I guess Nvidia had to do it in 2006 as it promised to its investors it was supposed to shift from 90 nanometre to 80 a while ago.
The new 80 nanometre parts will end up clocked at 650MHz - 90MHz faster than the previous 7600 GT clock. The chip behind it is G73 but we don’t know what Nvidia calls the new 80 nanometre ones. The memory on Sparkle card works at 1600MHz and Nvidia hasn't changed the chip memory support as it still works with 128 bit memory only. The card comes with 256MB memory and has twelve rendering pipelines. It supports PCIe 16X interface.
The Sparkle internal testing proves that the new 80 nanometre version of Geforce 7600 GT performs significantly faster than the previous 90 nanometre one. You gain around 500 marks in one of the tests. It would be interesting to test the 80 nanometre part versus 90 one.
