NVIDIA spokeman said it during the last conference call, which was confirmed afterwards, and we still had to go out and try to find if the 55nm production process they mentioned was about G92b or GT200 chips. Well now, we can finally say that in the last quarter of this year NVIDIA plans to ship many GT200 55nm GPU's and it looks like they will silently replace the old 65nm parts. Most new GeForce GTX 260 with 216 shaders and upcoming GeForce GTX 280 will be based on the new 55nm chips but it looks that NVIDIA does have a plan to increase the speed on the new products. Retail products based on 55nm chips are yet to be ship but we expect them in early December. - FudZilla

NVIDIA Already Producing 55nm GT200 Design Chips

We believe that the new SKU's should overclock much better than the previous ones and with the current prices, they will certainly put a lot of pressure on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 4870 cards and it looks that NVIDIA is not finished yet. What started as an insanely slow forth quarter for every market segment is turning in a rather interesting finish. NVIDIA was late with transition to 55nm, but they ramped up production nicely and they are about to sell more 55nm based products shortly. ATI did a full switch to 55nm and both companies are planning a move to 40nm in early 2009, which should be interesting.

NVIDIA has some market share to recapture but it will be tough as ATI's lineup for 2008 with the Radeon HD 4000 series looks really great. Also on last week's call, they said that their next generation chip that comes after 55nm is going to be a new architecture. They didn't really say how new and how revolutionary the new architecture will be, but we can hope that it will get NVIDIA back in the game. It was rather interesting to see that NVIDIA didn't want to comment if that chip will be 40nm based, as they tend not to comment about non-announced products. As usual NVIDIA is keeping full silence on any upcoming products.

This is probably going to be the most important transition for NVIDIA in its recent history, as if they win the performance crown back, they will be fine. But if they fail, ATI will grow to the next level. The new chip comes in 2009, which is as much as we could get from NVIDIA's blurry statements.