Is nVidia getting set to totally upset the graphics card market?
It looks like nVidia; the graphics card manufacturer, is going to be changing the graphics card landscape in the next couple of months. This shake-up will come at the hands of their new GT300 the successor to their GT200 series of graphic cards and will be coming with a totally new architecture.
According to the folks at Bright Side Of News is one of the reasons that nVidia’s Chief Architect Bill Dally turned down Intel’s offer to come and work for them on their Larrabee project. In their post they go into the real technical details; up to what they have been able to piece together anyway, but it boils down to this.
The GT300 will utilize a core set that uses MIMD-similar functions (Multiple-Instruction Multiple Date) rather than the current SIMD (Single-Instruction Multiple Data) structure. These cards; in MPMD mode, will be able to execute simple and complex shader and computing operations on-the-go. The GT300 itself will pack 16 groups with 32 cores (512 cores for the high-end part) and as a result raises the computing power of the GT300 by more than 2x when compared to the GT200 core.
As an example if nVidia gets a 2 GHz clock for the 512 MIMD cores, we are looking at no less than 3TFLOPS with Single Precision. The goodness doesn’t stop there
This is not the only change – cluster organization is no longer static. The Scratch Cache is much more granular and allows for larger interactivity between the cores inside the cluster. GPGPU e.g. GPU Computing applications should really benefit from this architectural choice. When it comes to gaming, the question is obviously – how good can GT300 be? Please do bear in mind that this 32-core cluster will be used in next-generation Tegra, Tesla, GeForce and Quadro cards.
This architectural change should result in dramatic increase in Dual-Precision performance, and if GT300 packs enough registers – performance of both Single-Precision and Dual-Precision data might surprise all the players in the industry. Given the timeline when nVidia begun work on GT300, it looks to us like GT200 architecture was a test for real things coming in 2009.
Source: Bright Side of News
Chances are that these beauties are going to hurt the wallet when they first come out but hopefully by the time I’m ready to upgrade my video card again they will have come down in price.
[nVidia GTX275 graphic courtesy of SlipperyBrick as well as a big hat tip]
