NVIDIA's Fermi: Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 2010
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The graph below is one of transistor count, not die size. Inevitably, on the same manufacturing process, a significantly higher transistor count translates into a larger die size. But for the purposes of this article, all I need to show you is a representation of transistor count.
See that big circle on the right? That's Fermi. NVIDIA's next-generation architecture.
NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that's what Fermi is - more than twice a GT200.
At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That's more than twice the processing power of GT200 but, just like RV870 (Cypress), it's not twice the memory bandwidth.
The architecture goes much further than that, but NVIDIA believes that AMD has shown its cards (literally) and is very confident that Fermi will be faster. The questions are at what price and when.
The price is a valid concern. Fermi is a 40nm GPU just like RV870 but it has a 40% higher transistor count. Both are built at TSMC, so you can expect that Fermi will cost NVIDIA more to make than ATI's Radeon HD 5870.
Then timing is just as valid, because while Fermi currently exists on paper, it's not a product yet. Fermi is late. Clock speeds, configurations and price points have yet to be finalized. NVIDIA just recently got working chips back and it's going to be at least two months before I see the first samples. Widespread availability won't be until at least Q1 2010.
I asked two people at NVIDIA why Fermi is late; NVIDIA's VP of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai and NVIDIA's VP of GPU Engineering, Jonah Alben. Ujesh responded: because designing GPUs this big is "fucking hard".
Jonah elaborated, as I will attempt to do here today.
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yacoub - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
uh-oh, boys, he's foaming at the mouth. time to put him down.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Ah, another coward defeated. No surprise.yacoub - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
"The motivation behind AMD's "sweet spot" strategy wasn't just die size, it was price."LOL, no it wasn't. Not when everyone, even Anandtech staff, anticipated the pricing for the two Cypress chips to be closer to $199 and $259, not the $299 and $399 they MSRP'd at.
This return to high GPU prices is disheartening, particularly in this economy. We had better prices for cutting edge GPUs two years ago at the peak of the economic bubble. Today in the midst of the burst, they're coming out with high-priced chips again. But that's okay, they'll have to come down when they don't get enough sales.
SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
It was fun for half a year as the red fans were strung along with the pricing fantasy here.Now of course, well the bitter disappointment, not as fast as expected and much more costly. "low yields" - you know, that problem that makles ati "smaller dies" price like "big green monsters" (that have good yields on the GT300).
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But, no "nothing is wrong, this is great!" Anyone not agreeing is "a problem". A paid agent, too, of that evil money bloated you know who.
the zorro - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
silicon duck, please take a valium i'm worried about you.SiliconDoc - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Another lie, no worry, you're no physician, but I am SiliconDoc, so grab your gallon red water bottle reserve for your overheating ati card and bend over and self administer you enema, as usual.araczynski - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
sounds like ati will win the bang for the buck war this time as well. at least it makes the choice easier for me.marc1000 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Some time ago I heard that the nex gen of consoles would run DX11 (Playstation2 and Xbox were DX7, PS3 and X360 DX9. So PS4 and X720 could perfectly be DX11). If this is the case, we are about to see new consoles with really awesome graphics - and then the GPU race would need to start over to more and more performance.Do you guys have any news on those new consoles development? It could complete the figure in the new GPU articles this year.
Penti - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
I think you mean DX9 class hardware, PS3 who has zero DX9 support and XBOX360 has DX9c class support but a console specific version. PS3 was using OpenGL ES 1.0 with shaders and other feature from 2.0 as it was release pre OpenGL ES 2.0 spec. The game engines don't need the DX API. It doesn't matter to game content developers any way.Xbox was actually DirectX 8.1 equivalent. As said next gen consoles are years away. Larrabee and fermi will have been long out by then.
haukionkannel - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Rumours says that next generation consoles are releaset around 2013-2014...But who can say...