Na eerdere berichtgeving en geruchten weten we inmiddels bijna hoe de complete specificaties van de nieuwe NV30 videokaarten van nVidia luiden, schrijft The Inquirer. De GPU met acht pipelines zou een kloksnelheid van 400MHz kennen, en via een 128-bit brede interface met snel geheugen samenwerken. Wat dat geheugen zelf betreft meent The Inquirer nu te weten dat het om 1GHz DDRII zal gaan. Dergelijk snel geheugen zou volgens Samsung begin 2003 in grote volumes beschikbaar zijn, waaruit The Inquirer concludeert dat eind dit jaar er al in beperkte oplage de eerste modules van de band zullen kunnen rollen, net op tijd voor de introductie van de NV30:
Many thought that Nvidia will use 700 MHz to 800 MHz memory which is not true, at least for the fastest implementation of chip, as we expect several cards based on same core. The fastest NV 30 will work on the nice round number of 1000MHz, bringing graphics memory to a 1GHz speed for the first time in history.
One of the key questions is, who has this kind of memory? And if you search the net for a while you will find that Samsung promised volume production of this DDR II memory capable of up to 1GHz speeds in Q1 2003. This means that some volumes will exist for December, when this card should appear on the shelves. Nvidia's CEO, Jen Hsun, never said that there will be loads of cards but there will be some cards shipping and on the shelves for that time.
DDR II memory at 1000MHz -- almost 400 MHz faster than the memory used on the Radeon 9700 PRO -- are key elements of the NV30's architecture that Nvidia expects will help it blow ATi's offering out of the water. So, I guess we've told it all now, except for the name of this product. And it's very unlikely be called Geforce 5.
