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Banshee this and Banshee that, G200 here and G200 there, PowerVR here and then disappear but there's still one notable absentee from that list of next-gen 2D/3D accelerators- the nVidia TNT. After all the initial fuss earlier this year, the nVidia TNT hype has died down a bit- mainly due to the fact that the initial 250 MPixels/ second fill rate still can't be achieved because nVidia couldn't clock the card stable at the initial 125Mhz as promised. With over 7million transistors (as Tom counted), the card has almost has many transistors as a Pentium II CPU! So it gets a bit on the hot side. Actually it gets really hot. You could fry an egg on it as it gets that hot, you don't have to or anything but you could if you wanted to (sunny-side up might get messy though?). Add to the fact that the chip is being planted on 0.35 micron, the heating issue extenuates as does the cost of the chipset itself. Initially it weighed in at some $45 per chipset! That was almost twice the cost of most of the other chipsets that were announced earlier this year. And still at $45, it hails as the most expensive chipset out there (at that cost it'd better be darn good eh?).
The jump to 0.25 Micron is still a long way off; nVidia have hinted at Q2 next year, which means that the initial 125MHz clock speed can't be achieved on the current 0.35 Micron. That's what we all get for believing the hype with press releases that are released some 6 months before there's actually a finished product eh? So all I'm gonna say is this- for God's sake nVidia, don't issue claims so far in advance that you just can't deliver when it comes to the crunch! It would be like some bloke bragging to his fiancée that his plumbing was some 10 inches. Then when it came to the bone time, his wife only got some 5 inches of joy and he would then tell his wife that he meant centimeters and not inches. It's all about the Marketing department at nVidia boasting about specs that engineering just can't deliver. Still I did enjoy reading the press release.
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