GF104 will be the first fresh graphics circuit of Nvidia’s Fermi family. The GF100 GPU found in the GeForce GTX 400 series house 512 CUDA processors through 16 multiprocessor clusters. GeForce GTX 480 uses 15 of these for 480 CUDA processors and little brother GTX 470 settles for 14 clusters and 448 CUDA processors. Even if you shut down parts of the circuit the transistors are still there and result in high manufacturing costs, and makes the chip unnecessarily complicated. With GF104 wee how Nvidia makes changes on the transistor level with GeForce Fermi.
With 8 multiprocessor clusters and 256 CUDA processors the circuits becomes less complicated and a lot cheaper to manufacture. According to our sources the CUDA processors has been optimized for the rendering portion of the chip.
Beside reducing performance Nvidia cuts GF100 more or less in half and this has a lot of positive side effects. The circuit becomes cheaper to make and the power consumption easier to handle. Thanks to 40 nanometer technology and a less complicated GPU the frequencies can be boosted a lot higher than with GF100. According sources GF104 will be capable of 900 MHz and up when overclocking, and even if we don’t expect these kind of clocks from factory it bodes well for overclockers wanting to take a swing at Nvidia’s new card.
Exactly when GF104 will appear and what the cards will be called is less certain. There have been stories about GeForce GTS 4×0, but also GeForce GTX 460. More information isn’t available at the time of writing, but GF104 should be capable of high frequencies for a mid-range circuit.
