NVIDIA claims 1,000 engineers worked on NV40 GPU
Now that the GeForce 6800 has officially launched, NVIDIA has described the herculean effort needed to design such a complex IC. The 6800, which is currently fabbed by IBM, and which has more raw computing power than a Cray T3E 512-processor supercomputer, took several years to develop. At the GeForce 6800 launch event in San Francisco, NVIDIA described the enormous R&D resources required to design an integrated circuit with 222 million transistors. According to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang:
NVIDIA spent US$400 million dollars designing, developing, and verifying the 6800
1,000 engineers contributed to the development of the NV40
NVIDIA used 400 terabytes of disk space for NV40 files and programs
5,000 CPUs (including Sun UltraSPARCs, Itaniums, Pentium 4s, Athlon XPs, and Opterons) were used to design the 6800
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