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It is in this context that Nvidia has announced a next generation architecture, which aims for even greater performance, reliability and programmability; unlocking even more software capabilities. This new architecture goes by several names to the keep the unwary on their toes: Fermi or GF100, although some in the press are mistakenly bandying about GT200. Nvidia has chosen to primarily discuss architecture and not to disclose most microarchitecture or implementation details in this announcement. Where possible, our educated speculation fills these gaps and will be clearly noted as such. The lack of details is partially due to the fact that products based on Fermi will not be out for several months – and even this timeline is unclear.

Curiously, they are also not discussing the graphical capabilities of this chip and instead focusing only on compute. Hence our discussion is focused primarily on the GPU as a compute device. Accordingly, we will try and use standard terminology and point out where and how GPU terminology differs.