Be sure to read the followup to this, including comments from NVidia.
NVidia showed the GT300 (Fermi) board up on stage during the keynote of the GTC this week, but was it a real Fermi board? Or merely a prop? They were pretty positive about release and production schedules, but SemiAccurate takes a close-up look at the photos and PR material Nvidia gave out and paints a less rosy picture of the situation.
Some things to note on it. First is that the second set of digits on the first line says 0935A1. A1 is for first silicon, something that, when coupled with a direct quote from Jen-Hsun of, “You are currently looking at a few day old silicon” (from here select the video “See video of Jen-Hsun Huang announcing Fermi”) kind of blows the whole ‘silicon in Santa Clara last spring’ story out of the water. I wonder if anyone will retract that, or just change the article retroactively?
To make matters worse, the other digits are a date code, 0935 means 2009, work week 35. If Nvidia starts its work week on the first full week of the year like everyone else, that would put WW35 at August 28 to September 5, 2009. Where have I heard that date before? Oh yeah, here. (edit: Referring to the 2% Yield number rumors).
While it’s no surprise that the boards were engineering prototypes (in reference to the author’s shock of finding common wood-screws holding it together), it is a bit disturbing if his analysis of the chip production numbers is correct. He also gets into amazing depth on some of the odd solder design and PCB layout issues, like this:
The 6-pin connector, on the other hand, lines up with, umm, nothing. There is a potential 4-pin floppy/sound/jumper block below it, but you can clearly see there is nothing in the vias, not even solder. The 6-pin connector connects to nothing, and nothing is holding it in. Except glue. Notice the connector is black and the hole below it shows white. The only real question now is, Elmers or glue stick?
To make matters worse, the mounting holes for the 8-pin connector, which should be between the 6-pin and 8-pin fakes if the card was real, are empty. Piss-poor fake job guys. Go read your fanboi forums, they do a better job, and work for much cheaper than your ‘geniuses’.
Unlike the original author, I do believe that Fermi was alive and well at the conference, but he does raise some interesting questions. Perhaps that was a “defective board” held up to show, or a very early engineering prototype (as all the functioning boards were in-use). Perhaps that was Huang’s personal “lucky presentation board” that he likes to use, but has long-since been obsoleted. Who knows.
Thoughts?
via SemiAccurate :: Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference.
Probably was fake. Companies do stuff like that all the time. Don’t buy a Fermi until companies have been given prototypes to test it out on and then they report back. Until then, don’t plop your money down!