VR-Zone

There has been considerable speculation of yields for TSMC's troubled 40nm process. From single-digit percentage yield rumours of early steppings of Fermi to under 40% for Cypress, there has been very little positive reports from TSMC's process. TSMC themselves admitted yields hovering around 40% in November, due to "Chamber mismatch issues". They promised to fix these issues by the new year, which they have sufficiently delivered on - as evidenced by the sudden widespread availability of the HD 5800 series, which was previously negligibly available.

This is reflected by the latest yield figures as suggested by Fudzilla's sources. Up from 40% to at least 60% and as much as 80%.

On the Nvidia side of things, unlike AMD, they haven't yet overcome teething issues with TSMC's 40nm process. Though higher than previous rumours of single-digit percent yields, 20% is the current rumour. There is no doubt that the yield will improve by the final production stepping, though Fermi is a far larger, hotter and more complex chip than Cypress, and yields is always likely to remain much lower than Cypress.

Unfortunately, being much larger in size and suffering from poor yields, GF100 is rumoured to be priced at $600, which is at least 50% more than the HD 5870 for a rumoured 20% increase in performance. Worst still, AMD have a greater price leverage, and at the same $600, we have a dual-GPU HD 5970 which is likely to end up much faster than the GF100 in most situations.

At this stage, the yield, performance and cost of the final production stepping of Fermi and GF100 are based on speculation. What is clear, though, is AMD has overcome all yield issues that initially plagued Cypress. This is clearly corroborated by the widespread availability of HD 5800 series cards, despite overwhelming demand and a total lack of competition.

Reference: Fudzilla