Fermi in trouble?
We all know it is constantly being delayed - but at the end of all those delays, what we were expecting was a stellar product from Nvidia. However, with today's press release, certain inconvenient details are revealed. Let's forget about the delays for now, and just consider the product itself.
The first Fermi GPU - GF100 - as we know for a while now, is a 3 billion transistor giant, taking a die size of around 500 mm2. Compare this with the 2.15 billion transistor, 330 mm2 Cypress on the same 40nm TSMC process, and you would be expecting a different class of product. Unfortunately, the details revealed today about cast an uncertain shadow over this basic assumption.
The first thing worth noticing is a complete and total absence of Single Precision performance figures or any comparison to direct competition - i.e. ATI's GPGPUs. It is clear that Fermi's real performance advantage would be Double Precision performance - had it hit the right clock speeds.
However, today's press release suggests Nvidia have missed target speeds by a lot. To be fair, Tesla products do clock lower, though not by much. In fact, GTX 280 and Tesla C1060 were clocked the same. Even taking a generous increase for Geforce products, things are still uncertain. As a result, DP performance is rated at between 520 GFlops and 630 GFlops. Suddenly, ATI Radeon HD 5870 - which wasn't even supposed to be a direct competitor - is performing right on par with 544 GFlops against Fermi's supposed strong point.
Consider Single Precision - far more important for gaming graphics, and things turn rather ugly. GF100's target speeds were reported to be...
