Bits and bytes about the NVIDIA GT200

Nordic Hardware has a writeup of some of the rumours about NVIDIA's upcoming GT200 GPU. The site says this chip likely offer DirectX 10.1 support and that it will have at least 1 billion transistors, some sources say even up to 1.3 billion.

The site claims the chip will likely be released in late Q3 2008 or early Q4 2008 and that it will be made at 65nm. That seems a bit odd though as the G92 and G92b already use the 55nm process.

Unlike AMD/ATI, NVIDIA is not expected to use GDDR5. Instead it will go for a more complex PCB with GDDR3, which means a wider bus instead of higher memory frequency. GDDR3 chips tops out at 1100MHz today. We expect GT200 to use these chips, and with a 512-bit bus it puts it on par with RV770 and its 256-bit bus and 4GHz GDDR5 memory.

The clusters have changed from 16 shaders per cluster to 24 per cluster, most likely MADD + MUL, and 10 clusters with the high-end part, which means 240 shaders all in all. These will be accompanied by 32 ROPs, 120 TMUs and 120 TFUs. The core clock will hopefully be in the area of 600-650MHz, which means shader clocks around 1500MHz.

As mentioned above, you won't see the card anytime soon, but it's not because it won't be ready but because NVIDIA doesn't have to launch it to stay on top. This is a single core chip, and rumors are that there will be more than plenty of stripped down versions, if needed. It all depends on what AMD/ATI delivers.