|
An engineer from Saarland University in Germany publicly said that G80 has 160 stream processors. He said this at their CeBIT presentation. The rest of the world knows that the G80 is supposed to have 128 only.
To try to confirm the data about the "160" Stream Processors I contacted my nVIDIA source who's an nVIDIA engineer as well and he said the followings:"We have designed the G80 with 160 Stream processors in mind etc. grouped in 10 clusters by 16 Stream processors..but we enabled only 128 SPs with the 8800GTX SKU...Since they are all scalar they don't take much of a transistor budget so 160 Scalar AULs are well possible considering G80 has a total of 750M transistors (681M for main shader core & 72M for the NVI/0 die)...so we designed our G80 arch with 160 Stream Processors in mind and enable the rest of the SPs on a later stage..probably on 80nm.." Asking him whether we will have 160 SPs on the 8800 Ultra he reply ed : "Since 8800Ultra is based on the same 90nm G80 as the G80GTX it consumes a lot of power and yields are not good so 8800 Ultra will not have 160 Stream Processors but only 128..despite the rest of the 32 SPs are already there ,albeit idle and disabled...
Asking the same nVIDIA source about when will nVIDIA enable the whole 160 SPs he reply ed :"Once we move towards 80nm process & lower with the G80 we'll have the means to enable the entire chip with it's 160 SPs etc..better yields and low power draw.."
The same source is informing me that we'll see 160 Stream Processors within the GeForce 8900GTX (80/65nm) to be released in June/July time-frame along with other members of the "8900" family of products..
There is to believe that these hardware enthusiasts with PhD's know what they are talking about, and there is a strong belief that Nvidia actually enabled 128 streaming processors only and is keeping the rest of them for a later date.
All this can be done in the driver, as you can enable as much stream processors as you like and you can enable the rest when the time is right, e.g. when ATI releases its R600 chip or right after in the form of "8900 series". We will try to find more about it, but we think we are on a fine lead. It would be cool if he is right, for maybe he has pre-announced Nvidia's next chip.
Time will tell...
Erik Larsson... Related Products :
|