People close to Nvidia have said that at the same time when ATI decided to introduce RV740 40nm, Nvidia also had its beta chips in 40nm. The decision to let ATI to introduce the 40nm first was based on business and financial sense as we’ve all seen that ATI never managed to get enough RV740nm chips.
ATI according to our sources, RV740 helped a great deal to
understand the 40nm and make things better. ATI sold all of them, but the
yields even today are bad, and this chip simply helped ATI to make things
better with the next generation of DirectX 11 40nm hardware.
Nvidia just introduced a few mobile 40nm and two desktop 40nm
chips and it plans to introduce more dektop chips in September time, and when
it comes to Nvidia, yields should be much better, but then again ATI has a big
chance to be the first with DirectX 11.