Monday, March 5th 2012
GK104 Die-Size Estimated
Thanks to some good understanding of geometry, and great Photoshop skills, the punters have estimated the die-size of NVIDIA's GeForce Kepler 104 (GK104) GPU, using a picture of the NVIDIA reference board that was leaked last week. Compared to the known die-size of an AMD "Tahiti"-based graphics card, the die-size of GK104 was estimated to be around 320 mm², about 45 mm² smaller than Tahiti. The relative transistor density of the chip, compared to AMD's 28 nm chips, were also estimated.
Source:
XtremeSystems Forums
27 Comments on GK104 Die-Size Estimated
Cayman had a 389mm² vs. Tahiti XT 378mm² that 1-2% improvement, so any 28Nm wafer price inflicted by TSMC was almost a fully impacted to the end user.
So yes Nvidia curtailing the dia for this go-around was a great move Now If Nvidia does pass that saving to those purchasing that would be another bold move, and very uncharacteristic of what they’ve done in the past.
Though be careful what you wish for what if AMD has Global Foundries doing their production next round and TMSC has less 28Nm production so they’re compelled to raise Nvidia’s next re-spin price to keep their shareholders happy. Did TSMC tell Nvidia even earlier that price would increase giving Nvidia an unfair advantage to start shrink the Fermi 2 years ago?
This is getting out of control :rolleyes:
what, nvidia having a smaller die size than ati?! the world really is coming to an end this year. :laugh:
I'm not really telling this to you, but if someone wants to talk about that issue seriously, people should really look past the old misconceptions, because Nvidia has been making bigger chips not because of an inherent disadvantage, but because of a reason: compute. Now AMD is going after compute too and their die size is much bigger than you would have expected in the past from a similar performing card in a new process. Nvidia has never really been too far behind AMD in perf/area, but it's just something that needs to be seen with some perspective, and most people just don't.
Take GT200 for example, one of the worst in that respect. It was freaking huge, but it was made in 65 nm instead of in 55nm and the most important thing is that it had 30 double precision processors on top of the 240 single precision ones, that could only be accesed by CUDA (no gaming). DP shaders are at least twice as big as single precision ones, so had Nvidia focused on gaming, GT200 would have been a 300 SP gaming chip. That's a 25% increase! Imagine GTX285 being 25% faster, that's as fast as HD5870 and now compare that to HD4870 and evaluate perf/area again on 55nm (260 vs 480 mm^2). It's a completely different story isn't it?
However I personally I am perfectly happy with my 6870 and will probably skip this generation.
7870's power efficiency is pretty impressive. about as powerful as gtx580 but consumes half of the power draw.
I mean - i can spend the same amount of money that I spent close to a year ago... to replace my card with a card that costs about the same and performs about the same with lower power consumption without any new tech... Thats like buying a new card for the sake of buying a new card. Meh.
Which also means the diagram is labeled wrong as well. Transistor density should be Transistors/mm^2.
Total transistor count should be Transistor Density * Die Area = Estimated Transistor Count.
I understand, its easy to get carried away with lots of leaks and speculation around the GK104.