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The rumour mill has manufactured a yarn which claims that Nvidia is preparing to write off millions and slash the costs of its graphics cards by half.

Source of the rumours is a magazine called KitGuru which initially thought that the cuts of Nvidia's fastest selling Fermi card the GTX460 were going to drop by $20. Now it thinks that $20 will not be enough to stem the tide of the Rise of the Radeons and an extra $10 will be needed.

What will be interesting is what AMD's reaction will be to this. If this is indeed true, we would dare to predict that it will drop the price of its own cards.

However there is a downside to this for Nvidia. It does not really have the sort of profits at the moment to deal with a price war and a lot of the cards were flogged to the channel at the higher price.

This cash would have to be refunded which could cost Nvidia. If there were 67,000 GTX460 cards in the global channel, then that price protection would cost Nvidia a couple of million.

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GTX 460 768MB @$179.99
GTX 460 1GB @$219.99
Prices are lower with MIR
newegg prices

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Risk production in 2H 2012, products in 2013
During its GTC 2010 technology conference, Globalfoundries announced an aggressive silicon foundry strategy with a new 28nm High-K metal gate (HKMG) fabrication process and for the first time has publicly unveiled its 22nm/20nm manufacturing roadmap.After risk production begins of its 28nm HPP (high-performance plus) node in the fourth quarter of 2011, the company plans to begin risk production of extremely dense 22nm/20nm advanced technologies in the second half of 2012. "We ramped to volume production at the 45/40nm generation well ahead of all [other] foundries and we are poised to maintain this leadership at 32/28nm, with plans to extend this to the 22/20nm node," said Gregg Bartlett, Globalfoundries senior VP of technology and R&D. To put the technology in perspective, the 22nm advanced process node has been cited to be just 25 percent the size of the current 45nm node used by both AMD and Intel today.

After risk production kicks off in the second half of 2012, Globalfoundries is set to introduce products based on 22nm/20nm advanced technologies sometime in 2013. In particular, the Dresden, Germany-based fab is already starting work on developing the 22nm CMOS process and will run the process in volume. "The 22nm node is being worked on in Fab 1, and elsewhere. Fab 1 will pilot ramp and go to some volume in 22nm," said Udo Nothelfer, General Manager of Fab 1 back in March. Development on the 22nm process has also been referenced to the IBM-led technology alliance between Globalfoundries, Infeneon, NEC, Samsung, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics and others.

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