14 DAY TRIAL // Slated to be released later in Q1 2011, Nvidia's GTX 590 dual-GPU monster card will feature hand picked GF110 cores as the company wants to deliver the best performance possible without increasing the power consumption and operating temperatures of the card.
As Nordic Hardware reports, the Santa Clara-based company has already started sorting out the circuits at TSMC to find the best performing GF110 samples of the bunch.
These will be used in the upcoming GTX 590 graphics card that is supposed to pack a pair of fully-fledged GF110 cores, according to some leaks that reached the Web just last week.
If these reports are indeed true, the GeForce GTX 590 will feature a massive 1024 CUDA cores count, 128 texturing units and 96 ROPs, its dual 384-bit memory interfaces linking a 3072MB video buffer to the GPU.
Built around TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process, a GTX 580 graphics card consumes as much as 244W in load, so Nvidia has to get the power consumption of the GF110 down if it wants to build a dual-GPU card based on this core.
These is why the chips are hand picked and this is also why the company has decided to go with lower voltages and lower operating frequencies for its flagship graphics card.
Unfortunately for Nvidia, this approach has a major downside as it limits the number of GPUs available, causing supply issues that are hard to overcome.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 is designed to compete with AMD's Radeon HD 6990 "Antilles" graphics card that is also expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2011.
Just like the GTX 590, Antilles is going to become AMD's flagship graphics card once it's released and features a dual-GPU design based on the Cayman core that is found in the company's HD 6900-series video cards.