ELSA hints GT206 and GT212

It seems 40nm has already been delayed. 65nm was a bit sickly at birth for the IHVs - it seems to have affected NVidia more.

Why have 65nm/55nm apparently given NVidia so much grief, comparatively speaking?

So you're saying that AMD is maybe using a library of regularised, "guaranteed compatible" structures as opposed to the "semi- or fully-custom" design that NVidia is using?

Jawed

 

http://translate.google.com/transla...news.php?news=2473&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

• GT206: Q4/2008, 55 nm
• GT212: Q1/2009, 40 nm​
• GT216: Q2/2009, 40 nm​
• GT300: Q4/2009, 40 nm​

Jawed

 

Thanks Jawed. Looks like I am holding off for the forseeable future to upgrade my graphics card until my will to resist gives in.

 

Based on the inofficial roadmap I think the GTX260 (maybe GT206->GTX270) should be the best bang for the buck until they introduce GT300.

Lets hope they'll announce GTX270/290 soon

 

thanks for that jawed.

That seems to make a lot of sense. Arun broadly agreed with it as well. Though I am surprised that gt206 has been delayed so much.

As an aside, I wonder what other folks at these forums feel, but I think that AMD's approach here has been vindicated. One chip and they can launch 4 cards from $200 to top. (if they wanted to release 4850x2 with gddr5 that is) plus the yield salvage 4830. It could be a one off thing (as gt200 was delayed), but for 4-5 months nv has had nothing to hide behind and AMD's entire line up(next gen that is) from v cheap to v costly, is out in the market.

 

So many refreshes.

Possibly the GT216 is the 40nm version of GT206. What is GT212 then? possibly a 192SP/384bit (or 256bit) mid range card to replace all the "filler" G92b based cards?

Its strange that nothing has been leaked from the green camp.

 

According to Fud:

• Unknown 40 nm chip in March
• DualGPU card in December

My guess is the DualGPU card will be based on two GT206.

 

http://rumorfeed.blogspot.com/2008/10/ex-nvidia-employee-tells-all-news-on.html

I think GT212 and GT300 is too late !

 

And that 'leak' is too false. (note that I'm not contesting the timeframes; delays can happen, but AFAIK that's clearly NOT their current roadmap, and at least one of GT212 or GT216 doesn't have GDDR5. Everything in that leak is so fishy it's ridiculous!)
igg: March should be GT216 if I'm right, see above: "3T|120A|3R -> 0.6TFlops+ -> GT216/Late March"

 

0,6 TF, this should be the performance/mainstream chip, right?

 

Yes, I presume the idea would be to replace G94 with G92-like performance (probably better in some ALU-limited cases, worse in others especially with AA/AF). If those specs are right that is; either way, it won't be ultra-high-end, that at least I know for sure from more than one source

 

Oh, forget about it - didn't look at the date of that posting. Since it's >10 days old, pls disregard the following.
[strike]Two things in your very own evidence might contradict that: First, the very low memory bw, indicating the use of 800 MHz GDDR3 and an additional disable Quad-ROP/Rop-Partition whatever you prefer.

Second, the Tesla C1060, featuring a fully armed and operational battle station... the force runs equally strong with this one... *shush darth, shut up*. What I mean is, that this produkt is also quite a bit lower specced than the corresponding desktop part GTX280 (<200 vs 236 Watts), although it's carrying the same amount of functional units, as opposed to quadro CX.[/strike]

 

But there is NO GT214 and GT218 on their roadmap at now. There are only GT212 and GT216 which are supposed to be released next year (most likely Q2).
...and doesn`t possible GT212 specs sounds more sensible when we take something like this -
96TMU/384SP/32ROP or 80TMU/320SP/32ROP? I think 480SP or 512SP isn`t good choice. 384SP or 320SP should be enough when clocks will be about 2Ghz. I think in 40nmit`s possible.
Another way is not increase numbers of TMUs and ROPs but significantly increase number of Shader Processors.

 

Anyone any idea what kind of shrinkage NVidia will get with 40nm process, when compared against either 65nm or 55nm?

The reason I ask is that Arun thinks that NVidia is not squishing features as closely as possible - preferring to space them out. If that methodology is kept for 40nm, what kind of shrink will occur?

Another thing is that Windows 7 makes D3D10.1 a first class citizen for the desktop UI. Does this increase the likelihood that NVidia will be introducing a top-to-bottom 10.1 line-up before the D3D11 cards arrive?

Jawed

 

The S1070 also has 800MHz GDDR3, but it really uses the same memory chips as the GTX 280; it's just clocked down to improve reliability. Sorry for not disregarding that point, couldn't just let it pass!

GT212/GT214/GT216 all very much do exist and are on NVIDIA's roadmap. GT218, I haven't heard in a while but I wouldn't really expect it before the others anyway. Surely you don't think the public leaks always perfectly represent NVIDIA's internal roadmap?

Isn't that exactly what I proposed?
G94: 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs, 64 SPs
G92: 64 TMUs, 16 ROPs, 128 SPs
GT214: 24 TMUs, 12 ROPs, 120 SPs

2x compared to 55nm, excluding non-digital stuff which should shrink very little, is a fair bet. That's assuming a slight increase in transistors/mm² in addition to the process' natural shrink (so as to compensate the lower SRAM shrink), which seems like a reasonable bet to make in my mind. Of course, if the feature set/arch isn't 100% the same or if they optimized noticeably more for power (as I've suggest everyone *should* do on 40nm) it's harder to estimate.

Honestly, I'm more interested in the kinds of clocks they could achieve. Obviously the 90->65/55 transition for NV has been awful both in terms of density *and* performance, so if we assume some of those are fixable internal issues and 40nm allows for higher-than-traditional improvements at the same time (although who knows at what cost), it could get interesting. Not that the same (i.e. interesting) isn't true for AMD also, of course!

Just to be clear, it's certainly not the only factor; I'm just arguing it's very likely to be one of them. Whether the voluntary desire to have that is the largest one or the smallest one, who knows!

I've heard the possibility that GT21x is D3D10.1 a few times, but who knows, there's enough FUD flying around that I don't think it makes a lot of sense to speculate about it at this point.

 

no D3D 10.1 would be the safer bet? as we are talking about another generation of G80 derivatives.

 

Really - not even the option for lower voltage's being used?

 

I really don't know, but I would *presume* it to be a combination of both; lower voltage than max in order to improve lifetime, and lower clocks for that given voltage in order to improve reliability.

 

DDR3 is catching up to GDDR3 now - seeing as they are sacrificing bandwidth for reliability anyway, why not roll GPUs with DDR3 IMCs that support ECC for Tesla? Seems to me that's one of the biggest complaints to GPGPU, no ECC, GPUs are intended for 'sloppy' operations (real-time rasterization) etc.

Wouldn't this open it up to a bigger market?

 

Allison Klein in her PDC presentation very briefly said that it's D3D10 not 10.1.

Jawed