NVIDIA GT212 rumoured to have 384SP

Expreview found some more information about the NVIDIA GT212, this is said to be the green giant's high-end 40nm GPU and it's believed this new chip will be launched in Q2 2009. The site reports the ship will feature 384 shader processors, compared to 240 on the GT200, while the number of TMUs will rise from 80 to 96.

Our source indicates that the number of stream processors increases from 240 (GT200) to 384, and the number of TMUs also increases to 96. Such improvements are fairly significant, kind of like 128 SPs of G92 to 240 SPs of GT200. As the second-generation rendering structure, GT200 features 10 TPCs, and we’re wondering if GT212 would follow this structure.

If so, GT212 will feature 16 TPCs, and there’re only 6 TMUs in each TPC, while there’re 8 TMUs in GT200. GT212 is very likely to adopt the third-generation rendering structure - each TPC contains four SMs and 8 TMUs, and there’re 12 TPCs, so there’re 12*4*8=384 stream processors in total. Generally speaking, the stream processors of GT212 increase by 60%, but TMU just increases by 20%.

The memory bus is said to be 256-bit instead of 512-bit, but the GT212 will use GDDR5 memory. Furthermore, the chip will be a lot smaller even though it packs a lot more transistors. The GT200 has 1.4 billion transistors on 576mm², and it's rumoured the GT212 may have up to 1.8 billion transistors in a core that measures about 300mm². The power consumption should be a lot lower as well.