Since ELSA revealed that GT212 would be another flagship card of NVIDIA, GT212 has been a focused topic. Being the top GPU this year, GT212 is coming to take the place of GT200(b) (such as GTX260/280) Series.
Our source indicates that the number of stream processers increases from 240 (GT200) to 384, and the number of TMUs also increases to 96. Such improvements are fairly significant, kind of like 128 SPs of G92 to 240 SPs of GT200. As the second-generation rendering structure, GT200 features 10 TPCs, and we’re wondering if GT212 would follow this structure. If so, GT212 will feature 16 TPCs, and there’re only 6 TMUs in each TPC, while there’re 8 TMUs in GT200. GT212 is very likely to adopt the third-generation rendering structure - each TPC contains four SMs and 8 TMUs, and there’re 12 TPCs, so there’re 12*4*8=384 stream processors in total.
Generally speaking, the stream processors of GT212 increase by 60%, but TMU just increases by 20%.
The memory interface of GT212 will reduce from 512bit to 256bit, which is quite similar to AMD RV770. GT212 will aslo use GDDR5 to make up the loss of memory interface. The memory clock frequency of GTX280 is 1107MHz. If the memory bandwidth of GT212 has to achieve that of GT200, its data rate must be above 4.5GHz.The new products are usually superior to previous ones in specification, so the data rate of GDDR5 is supposed to be around 5GHz. NVIDIA and AMD both use GDDR5 on their middle-end lineup, which makes us to worry about the productivity of GDDR5.
As to processing technology, GT212 undoubtedly features 40nm processing. Because of the sharp increase of stream processors, the number of transistors reaches 1.8 billion, while that of GT200 is 1.4 billion. Thanks to the new processing, the core die area is controlled within 300mm^2, and the power consumption can be also reduced greatly.
GT212 is scheduled to be launched in Q2 this year. As the coming flagship product from NVIDIA, it’s really worthy of our expectation.
( expreview )
Bookmarks