NVIDIA GeForce 9800 ~ G92: over a billion transistors, 512bit memory bus ?

http://www.hardspell.com/english/doc...p?news_id=1428


NVIDIA 9800 Series Coming Soon
Date: 2007-9-17


The GeForce 9800 series of graphics processing units, GPUs for short,
are based on the video processing chip codenamed G92 that is built by
the Taiwanese contractor TSMC, using the 65 nanometer fabrication
process. The complex architecture of the graphics chip and its
capabilities are responsible for the fact that the G92 has over one
billion transistors within. Going further than the 8800 series, Nvidia
implemented in the G92 chips the second Generation Unified Shader
Architecture as well as doubled precision support in the form of the
FP64 technologies. As graphics processing units are now known for
their parallel computing capabilities, the manufacturing company
decided to make good use of them and integrate the GPGPU as a native
technology.

Talking about parallel computing capabilities, well, the G92 GPU will
hit the one teraflop mark with its shader processing units that comes
in a MADD+ADD configuration which translates in 2+1 FLOPS=3 FLOPS per
ALU (the shorthand for the arithmetic logic unit). The fully scalar
design of the G92 series of GPUs is combined with a 512bit wide memory
interface and an extended support for as much as 1GB of GDDR4 graphics
memory. Graphics APIs supported are represented by the latest (in fact
not yet released) DirectX 10.1 and its open source equivalent, OpenGL
3.0. Other new features of the G92 series are the support for "FREE
4xAA", an audio HDMI compliant chip, a tesselation unit built directly
into the graphics core and improved performance and quality output of
the AA and AF units.

While pricing for the GeForce 9800 series will vary wildly across the
different manufacturers, two price ranges are being shuffled: 549-649
USD for the GeForce 9800 GTX and 399-449 USD for the GeForce 9800 GTS.