siapnar wrote on Sep 19, 2014, 16:17:

Verno wrote on Sep 19, 2014, 15:29:
I'd wait for the 20nm refresh but to each his own

When are these prospected to come out?

No one knows. There are two substantial rumors floating around:

- AMD/nVidia might be skipping 20nm since TSMC has had so many issues with it
- Apple has booked so much 20nm capacity for their A8 (iPhone 6) chips that AMD and nVidia are going to have difficulties to allot their own 20nm capacities, especially at a reasonable price because Apple and Qualcomm (and others) are much larger 20nm customers than AMD and nVidia.

Both rumors indicate that 20nm might still be far, far away or maybe not coming at all.
Also, nVidia wouldn't launch GTX 970/980 now only to replace it in a few months.
I would bet that GTX 9xx is here to stay at least until around May (Computex) next year. Maybe we'll see the usual GTX 980Ti as a new flagship until then (GTX 980 is a great OCer so it's very likely) and of course the GTX 960s, 950s, 940s and all that mid/entry level stuff.
If 20nm will be coming at all in between now and mid next year then maybe a single high end GPU that is going to be priced beyond sanity due to the low 20nm yields (think 20nm Titan).

I'm not sure nvidia has even talked about shrinking the process...

Of course they have (note the year is 2012!). It's more than overdue and was actually expected for last year already. The problem is TSMC. They have been having massive difficulties with the 20nm node (especially keeping the costs in check) and/or were intentionally denying large orders from AMD and nVidia because they knew that they would need massive capacities for AMD, Qualcomm et al.

This comment was edited on Sep 19, 2014, 16:46.