When Nvidia launched GT200 chip, the company claimed around 1TFLOPS of Single-Precision computing power, and roughly 150 GFLOPS of Dual-Precision performance. This discrepancy was mostly due to the fact that Nvidia went with dedicated hardware for the DP support. Every eight-shader cluster had one dedicated dual-precision unit, costing millions of additional transistors and resulted in doubtful performance. Fast forward to January 2009, and we have SP performance at 933 GFLOPS, while achievable DP performance dipped down to 78 GFLOPS. This figure is roughly half of what Nvidia boasted about at the time of launch, and sheer evidence that both manufacturers like to overstate the performance
ANALYSIS: Why will GDDR5 rule the world?
This memory standard will become a pervasive memory during next four years in much more fields than “just” graphics. Just like GDDR3 ended up in all three consoles, network switches, cellphones and even cars and planes, GDDR5 brings a lot of new features that are bound to win more customers from different markets. Background The reason for development of radical ideas inside GDDR5 lies in the fact that ATI was looking at future GPU architectures, and concluded that the DRAM industry has to take a radical step in design and offer interface more flexible than any other memory standard. Then, ATI experienced huge issues with
TSMC introduces 40nm volume production, advances in front of Intel
A while ago, I spoke with my sources at TSMC, who were quite decisive to make it to the front on the field of chip manufacturing. Heads of this Taiwanese giant decided to invest more than 10 billion USD in order to become world’s most advanced manufacturer, and their roadmap is more aggressive than anyone in the industry. The results of that investment are slowly coming to life, and as of today, TSMC has more advanced manufacturing process than any other competitor in the manufacturing business. Intel will argue its (very important, though) Hafnium or High-K material, but ever since I became a journalist, Intel
UPDATE: 55nm GT206 GPU powers both GTX290 and Quadro FX 5800
The honor of being the first product powered by 55nm G200-302 chip (a.k.a. GT206/212) went to Quadro FX 4800/5800, products that launched with a lot of fanfare earlier today. Besides Quadro FX 4800 and 5800, the new 55nm GPU will also power GeForce GTX 270 and 290. Essentially, we’re talking about the same parts. Quadro FX 4800 is nothing more but GTX270 with double the amount of video memory, while Quadro FX 5800 is equal to GTX290, but with four times the video memory. ATI is not sleeping, as the company is preparing an RV790 part , beefed-up version of already existing RV770 chip. G200-302
