If one believes the Taiwanese newspaper Commercial Times, graphics chips etched into 55 nm suffer a real shortage, so that the situation seems here to stay, at least until the end of first quarter 2010. Direct consequence, some graphics cards using these GPUs (GeForce GTX 285 Radeon HD 4870 X2, ...) are beginning to be rare.

The question is whether this shortage is the result of strong demand, a manufacturing problem, or (more likely) a commitment to AMD and NVIDIA to focus their new graphics chipsets engraved in 40nm, theoretically more profitable to produce. Both manufacturers have therefore more interest in limiting the production of GPU "older”...