Posted on Friday, January 17 2014 @ 16:03 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
TPU
reports NVIDIA's first Maxwell-based graphics card will be the GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Expected to be launched on February 18, this card will introduce a list of new features for NVIDIA, including Unified Virtual Memory and a 64-bit ARM core (Project Denver). If the rumor is correct, this card's GPU will be made on a 28nm process. The higher-end versions of Maxwell, which will follow at a later date, are expected to be made on a 20nm process.
TSMC's 20nm process
is ready to go and recently entered volume production.
Maxwell will introduce a host of new features for NVIDIA, beginning with Unified Virtual Memory. The feature lets the GPU and CPU share the same memory. Such a feature is already implemented on the current CUDA, but Maxwell could be designed to reduce overhead involved in getting the thing to work. The next big feature is that Maxwell GPUs will embed a 64-bit ARM CPU core based on NVIDIA's "Project Denver." This CPU core will allow the GPU to reduce dependency on the system's main processor in certain GPGPU scenarios. Pole-vaulting the CPU's authority in certain scenarios could work to improve performance
