Earlier in December we reported that NVIDIA had more than likely lost the big high-performance computing win with Oak Ridge Labs, and the lack of any kind of response pretty much confirms that.
Well, as the holiday approached and then passed us by, the news does not appear to be getting any better for NVIDIA. This story on Semiaccurate claims that NVIDIA has *ahem* lowered the number of shader processors on the architecture from 512 to 448 - a drop of nearly 15% of the compute power of the GPU. The SA article quotes from a Tesla product PDF that mentions the shader count and shader speed (1.4 GHz) along with a board power listing of 225 watts. Consider that the last 10% of any GPU/CPUs performance costs well more than 10% of the total power, had NVIDIA wanted to keep the 64 shaders it is apparently dropping on these first products it would easily be 260+ watt card!
We are also hearing news that the GPU is being delayed once again into March of 2010 - this is a quite a bit later than the initial November 2009 release planned during the summer. Another potential time frame was even said to be at next month's Consumer Electronics Show but that also appears to be out.
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Ouch. Ati must be over the moon with this news.
its coming nearly 6 months later, and if it isn't faster, well that is kinda pathetic.
I'm all for competition and actually prefer Nvidia cards, but my 9800 GTX+ was not cutting it anymore so I went with a 5850 when they first came out, very happy with it.
Maybe, if the GF 100 is slower than ATI's at-the-time solution, Nvidia will pull a 2900 XT situation on ATI and consumers will be the ones winning.
I get this feeling we wont see retail Nvifia cards until April or May.
By the time these cards come out ATI will have something waiting for it...anyways thats good for us consumers as competition lowers prices. Right now because Nvidia had no cards to compete with ATI's DX11 cards, prices remain high for the 5800 series of cards.
We need Nvidia to release these cards soon....
It is just as well I decided to put off my next GPU purchase to the 2nd half of 2010., So I can see what Nvidia actually brings to the table and it ATI brings out a [semi]refresh or not. I bought an SSD instead - the single biggest performance producer of my computer for years.