THERE'S A LOT of fake news going around about the upcoming GPUish chip called the GT300. Let's clear some air on this Larrabee-lite architecture.
First of all, almost everything you have heard about the two upcoming DX11 architectures is wrong. There is a single source making up news, and second rate sites are parroting it left and right. The R870 news is laughably inaccurate, and the GT300 info is quite curious too. Either ATI figured out a way to break the laws of physics with memory speed and Nvidia managed to almost double its transistor density - do the math on purported numbers, they aren't even in the ballpark - or someone is blatantly making up numbers.
That said, lets get on with what we know, and delve into the architectures a bit. The GT300 is going to lose, badly, in the GPU game, and we will go over why and how. First a little background science and math. There are three fabrication processes out there that ATI and Nvidia use, all from TSMC, 65nm, 55nm and 40nm.
They are each a 'half step' from the next, and 65nm to 40nm is a full step. If you do the math, the shrink from 65nm to 55nm ((55 * 55) / (65 *65) ~= 0.72) saves you about 1/4 the area, that is, 55nm is 0.72 of the area of 65nm for the same transistor count. 55nm shrunk to 40nm gives you 0.53 of the area, and 65nm shrunk to 40nm gives you 0.38 of the area. We will be using these later.
More: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137331/a-look-nvidia-gt300-architecture
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First of all, almost everything you have heard about the two upcoming DX11 architectures is wrong. There is a single source making up news, and second rate sites are parroting it left and right. The R870 news is laughably inaccurate, and the GT300 info is quite curious too. Either ATI figured out a way to break the laws of physics with memory speed and Nvidia managed to almost double its transistor density - do the math on purported numbers, they aren't even in the ballpark - or someone is blatantly making up numbers.
That said, lets get on with what we know, and delve into the architectures a bit. The GT300 is going to lose, badly, in the GPU game, and we will go over why and how. First a little background science and math. There are three fabrication processes out there that ATI and Nvidia use, all from TSMC, 65nm, 55nm and 40nm.
They are each a 'half step' from the next, and 65nm to 40nm is a full step. If you do the math, the shrink from 65nm to 55nm ((55 * 55) / (65 *65) ~= 0.72) saves you about 1/4 the area, that is, 55nm is 0.72 of the area of 65nm for the same transistor count. 55nm shrunk to 40nm gives you 0.53 of the area, and 65nm shrunk to 40nm gives you 0.38 of the area. We will be using these later.
More: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137331/a-look-nvidia-gt300-architecture