nVidia Unveils 'Fermi' Next Generation GPU Architecture

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	1st Oct 2009

nVidia Unveils 'Fermi' Next Generation GPU Architecture

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Looks like GPU technology is ready for another major leap...

Late last night nVidia announced its first major architecture upgrade since the G80 nearly three years ago. It goes by the (unexplained) name of 'Fermi' (Enrico Fermi dedication?) and will feature a mind-blowing 512 cores and three billion transistors. Cores will be broken down into 16 streaming processors with 32 cores each while GDDR5 memory will be its drug of choice.

nVidia's 'Parallel DataCache' technology and 'GigaThread' engine also make their debut and it's the first GPU to support ECC (error checking and correction). So while Fermi will form the heart of future GeForce and Quadro lines, if you haven't guessed already, we're not just talking pure gaming but GPU computing too.

"Fermi delivers supercomputing features and performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power of traditional CPU-only servers," nVidia proclaims on the Fermi official site page.

The first real world graphics card to feature Fermi is likely to be the 'GT300' series and while we don't yet know pricing or real world availability it's safe to say ripping video and playing Crysis won't cause it any problems!

Link:
nVidia Fermi Architecture

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Mik3yB said on 2nd October 2009

@ Hugo. Last time I spelt it the old way, one of the boys from NVIDIA corrected me.. I was only trying to prevent them from sighing at you too haha :D

Runadumb said on 2nd October 2009

Nvidia are playing a very clever game. With Cuda and physx they have me. When I played through batman (It rocks)I wanted that tiny extra immersion that physx brings. I know only... more

Jay said on 4th October 2009

I had one of those faulty NVIDIA GPUs so as long as ATi make comparable GPUs that's the reason I'll always buy ATi over NVIDIA plus I think the ATi cards look way better than NVIDI... more

haim said on 5th October 2009

heh, I wanted to see what the name meant, and interestingly wikipedia spells it Nvidia consistently while mentioning that the company themselves write NVIDIA in their material.

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