Friday, August 6th 2010
NVIDIA's New Entry-Level GF108 GPU Pictured
Barely a day after the first pictures emerged of NVIDIA's GF106 GPU that will serve as the foundation of various mainstream SKUs, its even smaller sibling, the GF108, has come to light. Available to NVIDIA partners as qualification sample, the GF108 is a small GPU in terms of package size. The die measures around 127 mm², which is about 23% bigger than that of AMD's entry-level Redwood GPU which makes various ATI Radeon HD 5500/5600 series SKUs.
On the engineering sample card it's pictured on, the GPU has a plastic supportive-brace, and is neighboured by four Hynix-made DDR3 memory chips. No SKUs have yet been named that are based on this GPU, though it is expected that a certain SKU based on this will be comparable to the GeForce GT 240 in terms of performance, and compete with AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5500/5600 series.
Sources:
XtremeSystems Forums, Expreview
On the engineering sample card it's pictured on, the GPU has a plastic supportive-brace, and is neighboured by four Hynix-made DDR3 memory chips. No SKUs have yet been named that are based on this GPU, though it is expected that a certain SKU based on this will be comparable to the GeForce GT 240 in terms of performance, and compete with AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5500/5600 series.
33 Comments on NVIDIA's New Entry-Level GF108 GPU Pictured
So in fact we should expect good performance of this chip if it support 128 bit memory bus which it should cause it support budget ddr3 chips and even 3year old g84 aka 8600gt came out with faster gddr3-1600 ntm gddr3-2200 on 8600gts. It would probably overtake 320SP Redwood chips carrying gddr3-1600 in 5550/5570 case. Somehow i dont believe it will follow GT215 (GF GT240) 8ROPs only wrong philosophy, and feature like full 16ROPs just like GF106 and other mainstream predecessors G84/G92/G94 from the past, and with that be much closer in performance to HD5670 even with limited gddr3 128bit bus. But it will probably consume far more power than 35W (HD55X0) and more like 55-60W like GDDR5 equipped HD5670
I mean if this comes out with say an 875core and 17XXmhz shaders, would be a bomb card. But that's just my imagination.
GT 240 perf summary[/urll]
it always loses to the 9600GT, so who knows, really is up in the air how the GF106 will perform
Of course it performs worse when GT240 (g215) is damn 128-bit card with ONLY 8ROPs while 9600GT (g94) was fully featuring 256-bit card. It means a lot in gaming/3D when you use only half memory bandwidth.
In case of GF100 series they ALL USE GDDR5 (guestimation --- they wont do unnecessary redesign job just to put gddr3 onto lowest end card, but it could probably work with dirty cheap ddr3 (different bstd)). So GF108 if wouldnt be put onto budget 64-bit pcbs for budget market will probably sport GDDR5 128-bit memctrl which will give it on pair (or better?) memory bandwidth as g92(a/b)/g94 chips had (8800GT/GTS, 9600GSO, 9800GT/GTX/GX2/GTX+, GT230v2, GTS240/250, (Dual GTS250 by Zotac) for g92 and 9600GT/GSO512, GT230v1 for g94).
Pretty big envydia's product line with only two chip designs :nutkick:
GF106 which you mentioned will be part of lower mainstream GTS440/450 and it'll sport 192-bit bus and be ready to whoop GTX260-216 ass (by some announcements :p)
I think it's pretty clear now, 26 month after ATi's hd4870 release, what gddr5 brought to the world over gddr3 and it's called memory bandwith (doubled per pin (aka.bit) in case gddr5 vs.gddr3 (if they work on the same base clock))There's in fact huuuge practical difference in the number of ROPs in envydia's case ;) (hint every pair of ROPs in G80/GT200, and every quad-ROPs in GF100 generation were connected to 32-pin (bit) memory line)