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8800 GTX or "The End of Big GPU Era" G80 and R600 may be the last big GPUs you'll ever see	By Ionut Ciocirlie, Hardware Editor 20th of November 2006, 08:25 GMT Adjust text size:


Nowadays, the concept behind a new GPU generally translates into as many transistors as you can count (or not) crowded into a space no bigger than a nickel. And it's been like that for some 6 years now. Since the first GPU arrived, things got a little mad. At the moment G80 GPU counts an amazing 681 million transistors making it the largest ever. And don't expect R600 to remain behind. AMD has recently taken a different approach to graphics manufacturing since they bought Ati. It seems that the big GPU is at the end of its lifetime since AMD have already announced that they will integrate a form of Hyper Transport technology into their future video cards and that will allow multiple GPUs to work together on a single board. It is said that R700 will actually be the first modular GPU, incorporating more little chips rather than a single big one. The problem here resides in the software since it's not an easy thing to make such a combination work, but it seems Ati engineers have figured it out. I don't know if Nvidia will follow this trend but it's quite logical to do so, since G80 cards are already huge monsters when it comes to size. A smaller GPU will also slow down the PCB and PSU mania. And that's not a bad idea either. What remains to be seen is how such native multi-GPU architecture will work.

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