Given the turn around times for silicon I'd say thats at the Earliest. I'd lean to pushing feb 2010 before retail cards are available. /Maybe/ even as late as april/may if they have to do another respin. (Which if they do... really screws them up. So look for the first cards to be "broken" in some way if they manage to stumble out the door)
Its embarressing really to make this kind of misstep. Their engineers must be cringing at this level of cockup. Its a seriously sad way to go. Just wish they would fire the drone that ****ed up the decisions to go this way.
Heh. I was actually going with the Willemette P4... I still think they have their own Prescott in the wings! But on 2nd thoughts mebbe your Prescott analogy is more accurate.Course, the question is whether when Nvidia ship the GT300 they're doing the equivalent of a Core Duo or a Penryn. Intel got shafted with P4 Prescott, recovered with the interim solutions of Pentium D, Core Duo, hit into a high gear with Core 2 Duo and perfected it with the 45nm Penryn architecture. If the GT300 is as hot and power hungry as some people think, it'll be the equivalent of a Prescott or some of the pentium D chips : hot, power hungry, clocked to hell with a couple of mostly working new features tacked on.
As for features. Thats another huge screwup. They knew the specs of DX10 and they screwed up and couldnt get the cards to work so pleaded with MS to "revise" the spec and we ended up with 10.1 being the more usefull standard. Now again they are playing catchup with DX11.
Oh well we can but pray they sort it out becuase otherwise they are screwed for an entire cycle and that means Dec 2010 before anything else.
oh and reflection on dx10 and vista? The driver schema was changed due to NV being unable to fix their broken vista drivers so again the "secure" OS was broken.
Thank god 7 is miles better. I've even run it on a p3 1ghz with 1gb of ram. Vista damn near exploded on the same setup. Colour me impressed. However. Threadjack... so i'll get my coat.