First Fermi GF100 Chips Named GTX 480 and GTX 470

Sunnyvale, California-based NVIDIA, one of the world's leading graphics card makers, has recently made an announcement regarding its much-anticipated, next-generation line of GeForce cards based on the outfit's new Fermi architecture. According to one of the company's Twitter accounts, the names of the first GPUs that the aforementioned Fermi architecture will boast are GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470. While the news is yet to be confirmed by an official within the company, the news is certainly going to generate a considerable buzz, with the cards reportedly due out in March.

The Twitter post on the NVIDIAGeForce account reads as follows:

Fun Fact of the Week: GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 will be the names of the first two GPUs shipped based on our new GF100 chip! While no specific details are made available on the performance or technical specifications of the upcoming GPUs, it appears that we are getting closer to the official release of NVIDIA's much-anticipated Fermi-based GeForce lineup. It's interesting to note that, the said post goes against all of the recent rumors, according to which, NVIDIA's first GF100-based cards will be part of the company's GeForce 3xx-series. As this time, we are waiting for an official confirmation from one of NVIDIA's officials.

As we don't have much to rely on, in terms of available details, we do have to note that naming scheme appears to be consistent with the company's previous generation of cards, with the G/GT/GTX tags. However, skipping the 3xx-series looks to be part of the company's new strategy. We can only assume that NVIDIA went down this road because Fermi is a new architecture all together and the company wanted to better differentiate it from the rest of its products. As you probably know already, the company launched the GeForce 310 a while back, as an OEM-only rebadge of the GeForce 210.

If history tells anything, it looks like the GTX 470 will have some cores disabled, while the 480 should deliver the full performance of NVIDIA's current Fermi architecture.