NVIDIA GF100 & Friends speculation

ASUS MARS II Graphics Card Pictured
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http://www.techpowerup.com/146588/ASUS-MARS-II-Graphics-Card-Pictured.html
 
Heard some news that for 28nm, NV is departing from its normal strategy of going for the high end first. They're taking a leaf out of ATI's book and going with a "pipe-cleaner" part on 28nm before going for the next gen. The chip is similar to GF116, but maybe a bit inferior in specs. First silicon is either back or expected soon from TSMC. And we arent going to see a next gen 28nm part till next year apparently.
 
Just like they did on 40nm with GT21x.

Well GT21X was a different architecture by itself (DX10.1 and some other differences compared to G9x), and had multiple chips. And there was a high end GT212 planned as well, until it was cancelled.

This time its going to be the same architecture, i.e. GF11x based and only a single chip if what i heard is correct.
 
so is it still a Fermi?
I believe we already expected a small chip first, but we thought that would be a Kepler.

but if they make a 128bit shrunk GF116 or a 144SP one, with 8 ROPs, that's a very good replacement for the "lame duck" GF108.

maybe that can run Rage and Duke at 1080p, and Crysis at 720p?
 
so is it still a Fermi?
I believe we already expected a small chip first, but we thought that would be a Kepler.

but if they make a 128bit shrunk GF116 or a 144SP one, with 8 ROPs, that's a very good replacement for the "lame duck" GF108.

maybe that can run Rage and Duke at 1080p, and Crysis at 720p?

Yep it is still a Fermi. It would be a lower mid-range chip, pretty much like the RV740.

I think your specs may be right, in that case it may end up around the same die size as GF108. Or it may be a 128 bit full GF 116, which would be about 130-140 mm2. Its going to be competing with Ivy bridge for most of its life so it will have to perform significantly better than a GF108. Another piece of info i heard is that it is an Optimus only part, no display heads built in.
 
there ought to be a companion chip then. I was feeling the output needs to be decoupled already when thunderbolt was being released. (a damn name and a megalomaniac one, Intel could have used "zeus, the lord of olympia")

they can do a card with an I/O controller that does both video output and thunderbolt interface. there can be two thunderbolts with no problem - the PCIe 16x 2.0 or 3.0 port is a good candidate to piggyback the needed bandwith on.

triple display can be done with two thunderbolt (i.e. two minidisplayport if you don't have any TB device) and a DVI-I connector (vital for compatibility with display devices from 1987 till nowadays)

they can also sell a quadro card with six TB ports while using the same GPU chip.
here six very high resolution outputs plus six full duplex 10Gb links, on a PCIe 3.0 card!
plus daisy-chaning and basic TB graphics cards for more displays, TB sound cards with eight sound channel each, monitors, projectors, sound amps with integrated TB interface
you can build a monster contraption with a monster link to a SAN with all this.

one more application would be redirection of the final output of a bigger, high end graphics card.
here the "GF117" card will play the role of an Intel GPU in the optimus scheme, if you don't have an Intel GPU present. or if you need the outputs on its thunderbolts/displayports.
 
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Heard some news that for 28nm, NV is departing from its normal strategy of going for the high end first. They're taking a leaf out of ATI's book and going with a "pipe-cleaner" part on 28nm before going for the next gen. The chip is similar to GF116, but maybe a bit inferior in specs. First silicon is either back or expected soon from TSMC. And we arent going to see a next gen 28nm part till next year apparently.
There were some reports of a GF117 some while back, however there's no sign of it in the 500 series so far (just 106's and 108 where I'd think a 117 would be). Maybe that 28 nm pipe-cleaner is GF117, or maybe the original (40 nm) GF117 was canceled and this is its 28 nm version.
 
I really wish NVIDIA didn't do that, especially since they pull that kind of crap with many SKUs. It just gets ridiculously confusing.
 
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