Codename: GF100/GF104 (Fermi)
Start saving your pennies... Your sock puppets are soon become ancient relics of the past! The future in GPU architecture is here!The GeForce400 series official release date is set for 3-26. DX11 Here we come!
-Information provided by Wikipedia.org
Nvidia has given the architecture an internal name of Fermi, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the inventor of the nuclear reactor.
The Fermi chip is said to be a large chip with 512 stream processors and 3 billion transistors. The silicon is to be manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nanometer process. This will also be Nvidia's first chip to support Direct3D 11. Consumer GeForce cards are expected to come with 1.5 GB of memory while 3 GB to 6 GB are expected to be made available to the commercial Quadro and Tesla versions (That is, 256 MB, 512 MB or 1 GB attached to each of the chip's six independent GDDR5 memory controllers). The chip features ECC protection on the memory, and is believed to be 400% faster than previous Nvidia chips in double-precision floating point operations. With these features, combined with support for Visual Studio and C++, Nvidia hopes to appeal to the High-Performance Computer users who might presently be using Tesla systems.
On 30 September 2009, Nvidia released a white paper describing the architecture: the chip features 16 'Shader Clusters' each with 32 'Shader Cores' capable of one single-precision operation per cycle or one double-precision operation every other cycle, a 40-bit virtual address space which allows the host's memory to be mapped into the chip's address space, meaning that there is only one kind of pointer and making C++ support significantly easier, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. As with the G80 and GT200, threads are scheduled in 'warps', sets of 32 threads each running on a single shader core. While the GT200 had 16 KB 'shared memory' associated with each shader cluster, and required data to be read through the texturing units if a cache was needed, GF100 has 64 KB of memory associated with each cluster, which can be used either as a 48 KB cache plus 16 KB of shared memory, or as a 16 KB cache plus 48 KB of shared memory, along with a 768 KB L2 cache shared by all 16 clusters.
The white paper describes the chip much more as a general purpose processor for workloads encompassing tens of thousands of threads - reminiscent of the Tera MTA architecture, though without that machine's support for very efficient random memory access - than as a graphics processor; it seems likely that, like the RV870 architecture from ATI, texture interpolation operations will be performed in the stream processors. This contrasts with Intel's Larrabee which has explicit texturing units, Intel's research having indicated that the memory access patterns for textures benefited from being handled in hardware.
Nvidia claims that the Fermi architecture is the next major step in its line of GPUs following the G80.
Commenting on the news, Nvidia stated that its planned schedule of product shipping in the first quarter 2010 remains uncertain and any rumors of defects are completely false. At CES 2010 Jen-Hsun Huang said that development had yet started.
On January 18 2010, Nvidia released the GF100 graphics architecture details through a white paper.
On February 2, 2010, Nvidia tweeted the official titles of the GF100 (Fermi) retail cards, the GeForce GTX 480 and the GeForce GTX 470.
February 18, 2010: According to X-bit labs, "mass availability of appropriate products is only expected in Q2 of FY 2011. [...] the Q2 of FY 2011 will last from May till late July, 2010."
February 22, 2010: According to Nvidia's twitter update, the Fermi based Geforce GTX 400 series will be "unveiled" at the PAX East 2010, in a later update Nvidia released the launch date of 26th March 2010 for the GTX 470 & GTX 480 to clear up confusion over the PAX announcement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_400_Series
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