nVidia GT300 unveiled: 512 cores, up to 6GB GDDR5

BSN has some information about the upcoming GT300 chip from NVidia, and the hard silicon numbers alone are staggering:

• 3.0 billion transistors
• 40nm TSMC
• 384-bit memory interface
• 512 shader cores [renamed into CUDA Cores]
• 32 CUDA cores per Shader Cluster
• 1MB L1 cache memory [divided into 16KB Cache - Shared Memory]
• 768KB L2 unified cache memory
• Up to 6GB GDDR5 memory
• Half Speed IEEE 754 Double Precision

But the awe doesn’t end there, check out this list of supported languages:

Ferni architecture natively supports C [CUDA], C++, DirectCompute, DirectX 11, Fortran, OpenCL, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL 3.2. Now, you’ve read that correctly – Ferni comes with a support for native execution of C++. For the first time in history, a GPU can run C++ code with no major issues or performance penalties and when you add Fortran or C to that, it is easy to see that GPGPU-wise, nVidia did a huge job.

If NVidia was aiming to revolutionize the world of GPGPU programming, then native support for C++ would do it for sure.  Especially if the speed boosts are anything close to CUDA/OpenCL.  Most C++ code won’t parallelize easily, but if it simply pushes raw instructions through faster then that would be a huge improvement.

Update:Read more about this architecture in the following stories:

• ORNL Looking to use GT300/Fermi for a new hybrid supercomputer
• Post GTC Keynote news about the GT300

via nVidia GT300′s Fermi architecture unveiled: 512 cores, up to 6GB GDDR5 – Bright Side Of News*.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.