14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has officially gone public with its upcoming GT-200 graphics processor, after a long series of rumors. The company planned to talk about its new technology earlier this month during a press conference held in Munich (April 10), but the announcement would have arrived too close to the introduction of its Quadro professional series of graphics cards.
The GT-200 series of graphics cores will follow the G92-based chips and will come with dramatic technology changes to the existing architecture. Nvidia built its Geforce 9 series of products on top of the G80 architecture, except for some minor changes and improvements introduced in the "VP2" video engine.
The first benchmarks of GT-200 have already started to flood the specialized forums, but their origin and accuracy should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the new features of the GT-200 graphics chip have been disclosed by Jeff Brown himself, Nvidia's general manager of Professional Solutions Group.
According to Brown, the new generation of graphics cores will pack an amazing amount of 1 billion transistors, that will account only for "pure logic, no memory as in the CPUs case".
The incredible amount of transistors are designed to focus only on graphics computing tasks. The huge silicon surface would only confirm the rumors that the new CPU will feature about 200 shader units. In contrast, previous G80 and G92-GPUs can only handle maximum 128 computing engines.
Brown also explained that Nvidia would give further details about the upcoming GT-200 graphics core in May. However, Nvidia's executive did not say whether the company would publicly disclose technical aspects or whether it would deliver its key information to the press representatives bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
The graphics specialist seems to accelerate its pace on the graphics market, as it has directly engaged a tight and dangerous fight with its Arch-rival Intel. However, the battle will be carried on Nvidia's field of expertise, where the company has the undisputed advantage of setting new trends.