NVIDIA is planning to launch the fourth GPU of the Fermi technology soon. GF108 is the name of the circuit and it is meant to battle AMD’s budget cards of the Radeon HD 5500/5600 series. Now that pictures of the graphics circuit has appeared we once again see a chip physically larger than the competing model.
The picture published at Beyond3D hasn’t been confirmed, but if genuine it reveals that the GF108 GPU measures about 127mm2, which makes it about 23% bigger than AMD’s closest competing GPU, the 100mm2 Redwood.
The graphics card housing the chip has four Hynix 8Gb DDR3 800 MHz memory chips, which adds up to a total memory buffer of 1GB and 64-bit memory bus.
The exact cards that will use the GF108 circuit isn’t entirely certain. There are rumors of two models at launch, but the question is what will separate them.
It looks like AMD will have the advantage in transistors per millimeter for another generation, which means it should be pretty comfortable coming the pending price war.
To the end user price margins plays a much smaller role than performance and efficiency.
