AMD has just unveiled Radeon HD 6800 to the press and in a week we will see the first cards from the Northern Islands family in stores. With the next launch, Cayman and Radeon HD 6900, AMD is expected to raise the bar, which apparently NVIDIA is planning to counter with GeForce GTX 580.
NVIDIA will, according to scattered sources, be working on a new Fermi GPU called GF110 and builds on a restructured design with new clusters. This is evidently not a regular GF100 GPU with all CUDA cores unlocked but a new solutions that has a new design and layour where it will see a big increase in texture units.
GeForce GTX 480 has 60 texture units but according to the sources NVIDIA has reconsidered things with GF110 focused on a beefier texture department that holds 128 texture units. This is done by changing the ratio in the SM units from 8:1 to 4:1 (CUDA cores relative to TMUs), the latter is a solution it used with the the GT200 GPU.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480
The rumors suggest that the card will use a massive 512-bit memory bus connected to GDDR5 memory for staggering bandwidths.
Made with 40 nanometer technology GF110 will be a big and power consuming piece, but the card shouldn’t have to drain that much more than GTX 480, which isn’t necessarily a good thing though. Other technical aspects talk of dual DVI outputs, single HDMI output and at least two PCIe power connectors (6-pin + 8-pin).
These rumors should of course be considered with a pinch of salt since we haven’t been able to confirm them. The only thing we can be certain of is that AMD is planning on dethroning GeForce GTX 480 with Radeon HD 6970, something NVIDIA will try to prevent with all means necessary. Perhaps GeForce GTX 580 but at the same time the specifications looks a bit too blown up, not the least considering the amount of transistors needed for this to work. The specifications could be a mix-up with a dual-GPU solution with GF104, but this is pure speculation.
We hope to hear more about this later on, but that NVIDIA is working on something to counter Cayman and Radeon HD 6900 is hardly a shocking revalation.
Source: PCGamesHardware
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