According to our sources, nVidia got the silicon a while ago, meaning that the chip taped out between January and March. The silicon is A1, but neither of our sources wanted to confirm is this the final silicon or will nVidia be forced to tape out A2 silicon to get production-grade yields. We heard that both ATI and nVidia have issues with TSMC's 40nm, and both companies are testing with the alternative company. If 40nm production yields don't satisfy, expect 32nm bulk silicon parts coming out of a certain Foundry with Global intentions sooner than later.
The specifications are identical to the rumored ones - given that now we have multiple sources close to the heart of the company confirming the specifications to us, we now feel comfortable and no longer consider GT300 information to be in the rumor territory.
512 cores, 512-bit memory controller, 256GB/s to 280GB/s of bandwidth on the non-overclocked parts.
BTW, to avoid any confusion about the GT300 or GeForce GTX300 series, nVidia's GT300 chip has several codenames. The GT300 silicon is destined to become a Tesla part; G300 is the desktop GeForce card, while G300GL is upcoming Quadro part. nVidia's old-timers still call the chip NV70 and if you roam in the halls of Graphzilla's Building C in Santa Clara, you might find papers with NV70 all over it. nVidia's current parts, the GeForce GTX 285 are all based on NV65 chips.
We saw how the board looks like and there are plenty of surprises coming to all the nay-sayers - expect world-wide hardware media going into a frenzy competition who will score the first picture of GT300 board. If not in the next couple of days, expect GT300 pictures coming online during Computex.
According to our sources, nVidia has no plans to show the GT300to the stockholders, analysts and the selected invited press [no, we're not in that club], but you can expect that Jen-Hsun and the rest of the exec gang will be bullish about their upcoming products.
Watch this space.
