NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.

If you recall, last May, I said a few things about the chip then known as GT300, now called Fermi or GF100. The executive summary at the time was that GF100 was too big, too hot, and the wrong product design in almost all areas. Nvidia was shooting for a world-beating GPGPU chip, and it might have achieved that. Unfortunately for it, there isn't a sustainable market for such a beast. The costs of that GPGPU performance were raw GPU performance and manufacturability. While GPUs have a large and sustainable market for the time being and perhaps the foreseeable future, the GPGPU market is another story altogether. It is a risky management bet at best.

What is Nvidia going deliver? As we have said earlier on tapeout, the GF100 Fermi is a 23.x * 23.x mm chip, we hear it is within a hair of 550mm^2. This compares quite unfavorably to it's main competitor, ATI's Cypress HD5870 at 334mm^2. ATI gets over 160 chip candidates from a wafer, but Nvidia gets only 104. To make matters worse, defective chips go up roughly by the square of chip the area, meaning Nvidia loses almost three times as many dies to defects as ATI because of the chip size differential.

The raw manufacturing cost of each GF100 to Nvidia is more than double that of ATI's Cypress. If the target product with 512 shaders is real, the recently reported 40 percent yield rates don't seem to be obtainable. It won't hit half of that based on Nvidia's current 40nm product yields, likely far far less.

Cost aside, the next problem is power. The demo cards at CES were pulling 280W for a single GPU which is perilously close to the 300W max for PCIe cards. Nvidia can choose to break that cap, but it would not be able to call the cards PCIe. OEMs really frown on such things. Knowingly selling out of spec parts puts a huge liability burden on their shoulders, and OEMs avoid that at all costs.

280W and 550mm^2 means Nvidia is maxed out on both power use and reticule area for any product from TSMC. There is precious little room to grow on either constraint. The competition on the other hand can grow its part by 60 percent in die area and over 50 percent in power draw while staying below what Nvidia is offering. That puts an upper bound on Nvidia's pricing in a fairly immutable way, barring a massive performance win. If you don't feel like reading to the end, the short story is that it didn't get that win.