Posted on Monday, March 30 2009 @ 1:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Theo Valich speculates
at Bright Side of News that NVIDIA may be working on a dual-GPU Quadro workstation card with 3.5GB or perhaps even as much as 7GB of GDDR3 memory. His story is based on a report that NVIDIA is working on a
single-PCB version of the GeForce GTX 295, Valich claims this card will compete against an upcoming dual-RV780 based workstation card from AMD.
But the problem is that Quadro cards need to go through a grueling qualification process in order to become a certified part for supported professional applications. OEMs also have extremely high standards, and in this perspective, an enthusiast-designed GTX295 would have a real tough time.
The answer is very simple - build a single-PCB card, launch it as desktop part in May 2009 and take time to certify the design until first days in August and Siggraph 2009 conference in Louisiana. We spoke with a source positioned in one of Far Eastern companies, and we were explained that this would be "nothing out of the ordinary" when it comes to building professional graphics cards.
What makes things more interesting is the amount of RAM. nVidia gained quite a lot of experience with high-capacity GDDR3 chips, meaning that GeForce GTX295v2 would feature between 28 and 56 spaces for memory chips. If nVidia decides to populate all banks, current GDDR3 chips could increase the memory to 3.5GB, while going for all the 56 spaces could result in massive 7 GB of local video memory.
