Nvidia has officially confirmed that their Fermi GF100 GPU will utilize 384-bit GDDR5 memory bus, 512 CUDA processors, 48 ROP engines and 16 geometry units.
The GF100 is expected to include 64 texture units, four raster units and DirectX 11 support as well.
According to ZDNetsAdrian Kingsley-Hughes, each GPU is made up of four separate GPC (Graphics Processing Clusters), which we can look at each of the streaming multiprocessor (SM) cores within the GPCs separately. Each of the SMs consist 16 or 48KB of L1 cache, 16 or 48KB of shared memory, 32 CUDA Cores , a polymorph engine and 4 texture units.
However, there are still many unanswered questions, such as price, clock speeds, power consumption and thermal issues.
He also mentioned that majority of latest games won’t “pushing” graphics as much as they once did, and most graphic cards that cost $100++ is already “more than enough.
Therefore, those who want to side step the whole PC gaming (and upgrading) bandwagon can buy a games console that will offer them years of gaming experience for the price of a high-performance GPU.
