Thursday, February 17th 2011
NVIDIA Readying GeForce GTX 550 Ti for March
NVIDIA is reportedly working on a new mainstream GPU for a mid-March launch. The graphics giant is planning to name it GeForce GTX 550 Ti, that's right, "GTX" prefix and "Ti" suffix monikers being extended to the core mainstream, in place of the typical "GTS". The new GPU will be based on the 40 nanometer GF116 silicon. Its exact specifications are not known, except that the GPU will use a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, and will be pin-compatible with GF106, on which is based the GeForce GTS 450. Its performance is estimated to be up to 35% higher than ATI Radeon HD 5770. Due to an electrical redesign over GF106, the GTX 550 Ti is expected to have a TDP of just 110W, nearly the same as that of the GTS 450, except having higher performance. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti is slated for release on 15 March, 2011.
Source:
VR-Zone
50 Comments on NVIDIA Readying GeForce GTX 550 Ti for March
How I miss when Ti was the pinnacle marker.
plz nvidia focus on keplar, i want new gpu's! xd
I'd sure like to see that.
*Wonders when will nVidia will bring back other monikers...like GeForce GTX 590 Ultra or GeForce GTS 540 MX*
just check the specs.:banghead:
Seriously tho, NV, drop the freaken 460 prices finally!!
IMO GF106 was an experiment. I mean, the chip itself had 192 SP (and related stuff like TMU, SFU...) and a 192 bit memory interface (1:1 ratio), that didn't make any sense to me (especially since they disabled 64 bits on the actual cards), except for Nvidia trying to find out more about their Fermi architecture. To try out different combinations of SP/ROP etc. It's just a theory, but I think that once they got first GF100 silicon back, they found out something was wrong (obviously) and as an alternate solution to the problem, they might have decided to experiment a little with the cut down versions. On GF104 they increased the SP to ROP ratio compared to GF100 and in GF106 they decreased it (GF104 = 3:2 , GF100 = 4:3 , GF106 = 1:1). This way they could know which combination works best for which tasks and so they can better design future chips (i.e Kepler), which no doubt will be based on Fermi's base architecture.
What does all this mean for GF116? Well according to my own theory and assumptions, GF116 may very well be a very different animal than GF106... The higher SP-to-ROP ratio on GF104/114 clearly won in regards to gaming performance and so it makes more sense to apply a high ratio on GF116. GTX550 is going to have 128 bit again and this time around it sure doesn't have any disabled, they will just not be there to egin with. Instead they could have added another SP cluster or two* in there which would make up for the performance improvement they are talking about. ROP partitions take up more silicon space than SPs after all.
* In fact, I'm going to make a wild guess/speculation and I'm going to bet that GF116 is still some sort of experimental chip and will sport 64 SP wide clusters (4x16 SP) instead of 48SP (3x16) and 32SP (2x16) on GF104/114/106 and GF100/110, respectively. 64 SPs always made sense in my head, more than 48 anyway. Every cluster or SM has dual schedulers after all, so with 3 SIMDs, one scheduler is idling every odd cycle. And the chip on the GTX550 has nothing to do with the one in GTX460, that's why newtekie1 said that... :shadedshu:shadedshu:shadedshu:shadedshu
now they are gonna MILK the Ti brand, just like EA milks COD and UBI milks Assassin's Creed, and now EA wanna milk Dead Space also...
:banghead:
I guess we'll have to wait and see how this GPU fleshes out.
Now we'll have GTX590 Ti and all that shit..