NVIDIA reveals GT300 Fermi architecture at GPU Tech Conference

Posted on Wednesday, September 30 2009 @ 22:36:58 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck

NVIDIA has presented the Fermi architecture at its GPU Tech Confernce in San Jose. The company touts Fermi as the foundation for the world's first computational graphics processing units (GPUs), the new GPU features 512 CUDA cores that promise up to 8x faster double precision GPGPU performance, there's the new NVIDIA Parallel DataCache with L1 cache to improve bandwidth and reduce latency, L2 cache to boost data sharing across the GPU, C++ support, support for running multiple CUDA kernels at the same time, and support for ECC to detect and correct errors.

Here's a list of the special new features of Fermi:

As the foundation for NVIDIA's family of next generation GPUs namely GeForce(R), Quadro(R) and Tesla(R) "Fermi" features a host of new technologies that are "must-have" features for the computing space, including:

C++, complementing existing support for C, Fortran, Java, Python, OpenCL and DirectCompute.

ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large scale

512 CUDA Cores(TM) featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard, surpassing even the most advanced CPUs

8x the peak double precision arithmetic performance over NVIDIA's last generation GPU. Double precision is critical for high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as linear algebra, numerical simulation, and quantum chemistry

NVIDIA Parallel DataCache(TM) - the world's first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand

NVIDIA GigaThread(TM) Engine with support for concurrent kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX(R) fluid and rigid body solvers)

Nexus - the world's first fully integrated heterogeneous computing application development environment within Microsoft Visual Studio

More details and a Fermi architecture whitepaper can be found at NVIDIA.

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NVIDIA reveals GT300 Fermi architecture at GPU Tech Conference