NVIDIA GF100 Architecture and Feature Preview
Back in late September of last year, NVIDIA disclosed some information regarding its next generation GPU architecture, codenamed "Fermi". At the time, actual product names and detailed specifications were not disclosed, nor was performance in 3D games, but high-level information about the architecture, its strong focus on compute performance, and broader compatibility with computational applications were discussed.
We covered much of the early information regarding Fermi in this article. Just to recap some of the more pertinent details found there, the GPU codenamed Fermi will feature over 3 billion transistors and be produced using TSMC's 40nm processes. If you remember, AMD's RV870, which is used in the ATI Radeon HD 5870, is comprised of roughly 2.15 billion transistors and is also manufactured at 40nm. Fermi will be outfitted with more than double the number of cores as the current GT200, 512 in total. It will also offer 8x the peak double-precision compute performance as its predecessor, and Fermi will be the first GPU architecture to support ECC. ECC support will allow Fermi to compensate for soft error rate (SER) issues and also potentially allow it to scale to higher densities, mitigating the issue in larger designs. The GPU will also be execute C++ code.
During the GPU Technology conference that took place in San Jose, NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off the first Fermi-based Tesla-branded prototype boards, and talked much of the compute performance of the architecture. Game performance wasn't a focus of Huang's speech, however, which led some to speculate that NVIDIA was forgetting about gamers with this generation of GPUs. That obviously is not the case, however. Fermi is going to be a powerful GPU after all. The simple fact of the matter is, NVIDIA is late with their next-gen GPU architecture and the company chose a different venue--the Consumer Electronic Show--to discuss Fermi's gaming oriented features...
NVIDIA GF100 Architecture and Feature Preview
