Published in Graphics

GT300 is codenamed Fermi

by on28 September 2009

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Named after a nuclear reactor


The chip that we ended up calling GT300 has internal codename Fermi. The name might suit it well as Enrico Fermi was the chap that came up with the first nuclear reactor.

The new Nvidia chip is taped out and running, and we know that Nvidia showed it to some important people. The chip should  be ready for very late 2009 launch. This GPU will also heavily concentrate on parallel computing and it will have bit elements on chip adjusted for this task. Nvidia plans to earn a lot of money because of that.

The chip supports GDDR5 memory, has billions of transistors and it should be bigger and faster than Radeon HD 5870. The GX2 dual version of card is also in the pipes. It's well worth noting that this is the biggest architectural change since G80 times as Nvidia wanted to add a lot of instructions for better parallel computing.

The gaming part is also going to be fast but we won’t know who will end up faster in DirectX 11 games until we see the games. The clocks will be similar or very close to one we've seen at ATI's DirectX 11 card for both GPU and memory but we still don't know enough about shader count and internal structure to draw any performance conclusions.
 

Of course, the chip supports DirectX 11 and Open GL 3.1

 

Last modified on 28 September 2009
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