I scoped this article out over on Anandtech. Considering how many of our members are Nvidia fans, I thought this"d make for an interesting read. Enjoy.
Almost two years ago both ATI and NVIDIA had to start making decisions about the GPUs that they would be releasing today. ATI made the decision to build R300 on a 0.15-micron process and NVIDIA was firm in their beliefs that TSMC"s 0.13-micron process would be mature enough to use for Fall 2002 release of NV30.
As with any decision, the paths ATI and NVIDIA chose to go down led them through different obstacles. ATI"s hybrid ATI/ArtX design team had to deal with the inevitably large die that a ~110M transistor part would have on a 0.15-micron process. To put things into perspective, this is a chip with more transistors than Intel"s upcoming Prescott core, which will be built on a 0.09-micron process and a 1MB L2 cache. ATI"s research told them that they would not have a mature 0.13-micron process to manufacture R300 on so they confined themselves to a 0.15-micron process, which resulted in requirements such as a 10-layer PCB and an additional power source for the Radeon 9700 Pro.