DM is right, I hope Gibbo corrects the incorrect specs as it is misleading but I don't think it's intentional.
As for the price, 580 supplies are very very sparse at the moment, stock situation could actually be worse than when the 480 hit, I'm not surprised we are seeing some inflated prices. Are Nvidia having trouble making the GF110? are yields that bad.
Yes and no.
I would suspect they knew the 6970 is a VERY special card(for the same process the performance bump will be nothing short of a miracle) and theres one way around that, launch first and claim the win and feign ignorance when a better card is released "So Nvidia, whats your opinion on the 6970?" "The what now? doors going, got to run, sorry" then hangs up and has the Nvidia number disconnected
How can you rush a launch on a product, hot lots, basically not all the time by any means, but quite a bit of the 6-8 weeks it can take to build gpu's is in waiting for machinery to be ready. IE one oven takes 1000 wafers and cooks them for a week, so TSMC want to fill it up to max before turning it on as it will cost a decent wedge just to run and they produce more a month if every machine is at capacity. If you pay extra you can get them to put 50 wafers in and basically push through 580gtx wafers through ahead of everything with no waiting between various stages. It costs a LOT more and kills profits and is useless long term, but to get a quick early batch done its more than possible and Nvidia have been known to do it pretty often. You can also do risk production wafers, rather than tape out then make 100 wafers and test they work, you can make 2000 wafers and pray to christ they work, because if they don't you've through 10
MILLION down in the bin, literally.
So theres quite a few ways to get some early batches quickly, then have a pretty long wait for the next "normal" lot to be ready.
That on top of the fact yields simply won't be great. Remember GF100 is 529mm2 and literally yielded not enough to release at 512sp's, the 580gtx is improved, but yields for the 512sp's are likely worse than yields for a 480sp salvaged 480gtx as, well, with the 580gtx you need basically the full 520mm2(its slightly smaller) to work, with a 480gtx you only needed 529mm2 - 1/16th of the shaders/rops/tmu's to be working, which themselves take up around 65% of the core maybe.
IE yields are better than the non existant 512sp GF100, but theres no chance a 520mm2 cores yields are going to be "good".
It would be certain in any way but I'd expect one of two things to happen, continual low supply, 5-10 cards here and there of various brands for months on end, in which case I'd suspect just really very poor yields. If in a couple of weeks, or a couple of months we see a pretty dramatic increase in supply then I'd assume they did indeed just push through some very expensive hot lots or possibly risk wafers to get some early half paper half hard launch stock going, but real production supply starting at a later date.
The 6970 might dictate what Nvidia do though, if the 6970 is flat out faster, 30% smaller and 30% cheaper, Nvidia won't have a huge incentive to mass produce 580gtx's. If the 6970 is on par or a bit slower then they have more reason to produce a higher quantity so they might be waiting on the 6970 to see how it does and push more 560gtx's into production, who really knows.
