
Cores cut to increase availability
According to Digitimes, Nvidia's Fermi is still plagued by poor
yields, but the company is still expected to have enough cards at
launch.TSMC's yields are apparently still under 50 percent and it is unclear whether they can or will improve anytime soon.
However, as we said earlier, Nvidia opted to reduce the number of cores
from 512 to 480 on the flagship GTX 480, while the GTX 470 will have
even fewer cores, 448 to be exact.
Should TSMC manage to improve the yields, Nvidia could probably launch
a faster version with more shaders, putting more pressure on ATI.
However, ATI has shipped a few million DirectX 11 cards since October,
so this is a small consolation for Nvidia.
More
here.