NVidia to discontinue 470 already??

May 19th, 2010 at 6:16 pm - Author faith

KitGuru’s sources in Taiwan have told us that nVidia has stopped taking orders for the GeForce GTX 470 card. Is this a temporary measure or has it been killed off less than 2 months after its launch on March 26th?

There’s no doubt that Fermi has huge potential. Its complexity and, in any ways, forward looking technology is interesting to KitGurus around the globe.

That said, not every flavour of Fermi will be a success.

On Wednesday, KitGuru heard that, for now, no more orders are being taken for the nVidia GeForce GTX470.

If true, that would make it one of the shortest lived graphic cards in history. But what’s the full picture?

When KitGuru broke the earlier story that nVidia appeared to be using GTX470 PCB production for the new GTX465, it immediately raised a question mark about why the GTX470 production line no longer needed them.

Jay Puri

Jay Puri, Executive Vice President of World Wide Sales, is a wise man at nVidia and any decision to drop superfluous lines will have been given the go ahead by him. Same goes for product branching. Unfortunately, so far, he has not been available to comment on our report.

KitGuru has learned that nVidia will look to spice up the Fermi range with a sexy GTX465 card with a lower price and strong performance figures. Now we need to see how it measures up against the Radeon HD 5850. If that move is successful, does that call the future of the GTX470 into question?

KitGuru UPDATE: Word has now reached us of a 375w, dual-GPU, GTX490. If true, then that could explain any reluctance to take new orders for the GTX470. nVidia could have choosen to move its GTX470 cores to the new GTX490 card, while it positions the 200w GTX465 chip against AMD’s Radeon HD 5850.

We’re still as keen as mustard to see if the GTX465, armed with 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5, will be enough to win that battle.

For now, it may not be the end of the road for the GTX470 – instead a well placed fork could be in order.

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May 20th, 2010 at 10:06 pm - Author faith

Over the past week or so, we have heard a lot of rumours about nVidia’s products. As wizened KitGurus, you can trust us when we say that our sources are both plentiful and well placed. We report this kind of story when we have no reason to doubt a story. That said, we do stand to be corrected when a company goes as far as to issue a definitive denial.

After carefully reading through all of our posts [we like to think we're every PR director's favourite bookmark - Ed], nVidia’s headquarters has made direct contact with KitGuru about our recent revelations. Intrigued? We were.

nVidia has chosen not to contradict our stories relating to the launch of the 50 watt Fermi, GT420 or GTS455 etc, which was nice. Also, they have also been careful to avoid saying that KitGuru’s revelations about the pricing or physical specifications of the GTX465 are wrong.

However, they were adamant that at no time has production of the GTX470 card been affected. This contradicts our story that GTX470 chips have been moved to the creation of the GTX490 (and high end notebook systems from Clevo and others).

Also, they have stated categorically that all of nVidia’s new cards fully support CUDA and that there are no plans to release an nVidia card in this generation that does not have CUDA support. The nVidia spokesperson we talked to was prepared to go on record as saying “These rumors are categorically incorrect.” Fair enough.

We have to say that, given our source on the story, it’s possible that some misunderstanding might have occurred between the various groups involved in bringing an nVidia card to market. For example, if a pre-release driver for GTX465 was delivered to a ‘tester’ and CUDA support had not been included in the code at that stage, then that could have caused a misunderstanding.

KitGuru says: Lucky we don’t live in a world of instant information transfer, greased-lightning rumour mills and news editors with hairline triggers. Seriously though, Santa Clara was under no obligation whatsoever to contact KitGuru about these stories and to put nVidia’s position forward. We really appreciate them taking the time to do so.

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