NVIDIA's NV30 - Where are you?

Debunking Myths - A Multichip NV30?

With talk of poor yields at TSMC, the obvious rumor to come from all of this is that NVIDIA will be moving production to another foundry, such as UMC. The official word from NVIDIA is that they aren't moving to UMC and that production is going as planned at TSMC.

Another, albeit unrelated, myth is this idea of NV30 being a multichip solution like the old 3dfx Voodoo5. Although there's some basis for the rumor, NV30 will be single chip solution just like the R300 as well as every NVIDIA GPU to date. The basis for the multichip NV30 myth comes from the "discovery" that the NV30 contains an AGP bridge that allows more than one chip to be present on a single AGP card. What most don't understand however is that every NVIDIA GPU since the GeForce2 GTS has had this capability, it has simply never been used (nor was there a particular need for it).

ATI was in a "right place at the right time" situation when they introduced the Rage Fury MAXX, a multichip Rage 128 Pro solution but since then there hasn't been a need for either ATI or NVIDIA to produce a multichip solution. Both companies have been able to compete very well with their single chip solutions, not to mention that the power requirements of two R300s or two NV30s would cause a manufacturing nightmare. In fact, you'd be more likely to find 3DLabs, Matrox or S3 produce a multichip solution in order to compete with the performance of the flagship ATI/NVIDIA products (akin to ATI's re-entry into the enthusiast gamer market with the Rage Fury MAXX).