Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has posted an open letter on his company’s blog addressing concerns over the GTX 970.
Nvidia and its add-in-board partners have faced a rough month because of the GTX 970 and its lack of advertised memory. Initially, in late January, Nvidia denied any problems with the card, however a few days later the company issued another press statement acknowledging it didn’t communicate specifications correctly and offered a driver update.
“We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer – i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB. GTX 970 is a 4GB card,” Huang wrote. “However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.”
Huang blamed a lack of proper communication with the press and reviewers for the confusion.
“Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory,” he wrote.
“This new feature of Maxwell should have been clearly detailed from the beginning.”
