John At The Center

See that big circle on the right? That’s Fermi. NVIDIA’s next-generation architecture.

NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that’s what Fermi is – more than twice a GT200.

At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That’s more than twice the processing power of GT200 but, just like RV870 (Cypress), it’s not twice the memory bandwidth.

I asked two people at NVIDIA why Fermi is late; NVIDIA’s VP of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai and NVIDIA’s VP of GPU Engineering, Jonah Alben. Ujesh responded: because designing GPUs this big is “fucking hard”.

Jonah elaborated, as I will attempt to do here today.

via AnandTech: NVIDIA’s Fermi: Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 2010.