just a question here, if that BSN article is correct and the card is 480SP(meaning they disabled a SM) wouldn't that make the GTX480 only have 60TMU's and 15 tesselators since each SM is linked to 4TMU's and 1 tesselator
Yeah, it looks like, but who knows. I'm still skeptical about how they are disabling only 1 and 3 SMs. That makes one or three of the GPCs have one less SM, but the chip still has the same triangle setup and rasterizers (some with less SMs to work with). idk it's weird. I always thought that the second SKU would have an entire GPC disabled, it always made more sense to me, but what do I know? Nothing so...
And for all we know they could be disabling individual SPs. 2 SPs per SM in the GTX480 and 4 in the GTX470. That makes much more sense to me tbh and would make it a much better yielder (being able to disable defective SPs no matter where they are), which would explain the discrepancy on what different people say about Fermi yields. One could hear that Fermi has an average of x defects (let's say 9) on different parts of the chip and assume, based on that and on the typical harvesting methods, that 9 SMs (288 SPs) had been rendered useless (rendering the chip useless too), when in fact only 9 SPs were rendered useless and could still classify as a GTX480, if you know what I mean.
Pure speculation I know, but I still have vivid the claim that Nvidia made about Fermi being much more flexible and scalable and looking from the perspective of them disabling SMs, I don't know were that flexibility can be found. They'd be doing the same as in the past, where's that flexibility?