FERMI Architecture: Evolution of a species

GF114 is the evolution of GF104 graphics chip, the first version dedicated to the mainstream market of the project based on Fermi architecture from Nvidia. GF104 has represented for this company a great commercial success and with the GeForce GTX 460 has hit the target to offer a card from the large computational capabilities, together with a compact size with very different consumption and heat from the top range.

The launch of the first Fermi version on the consumer market has been entrusted to the GeForce GTX 480 and 470; these two top range proposals have been put in highlight outstanding performance compared to competitors, but at the same time showed the limits of the first realization of project based on GF 100. The well-known problems were represented by consumption and heat during operation quite high. Fermi has emphasized how this architecture would not be adapt to the mainstream. But Nvidia, with the GeForce GTX 460, and a general reengineering of the GF100 graphics chip, was able to offer a card with a new GF104 graphics chip, which virtually eliminates all major defects found in the top range, going to win a slice of consumer market of absolute importance.

The introduction of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti have marked the evolution of the GF104 graphics chip: the new GF114 GPU allowed to further improve the benefits the old graphics chip already had, proposing a video card designed for medium/high market and that once again proved to be the good enough.

Nvidia takes another step forward bringing yet another video card, that this time bridges the quite high performance gap between the GeForce GTX 550 Ti and GeForce GTX 560 Ti.The GF114 graphics chip, the version with just 336 shaders enabled, has been fitted in the GeForce GTX 560 without the Ti suffix.It can be defined as an evolutionary step of the GF104 GPU, as it has the same specifications except for the operating frequencies. In fact, Nvidia has not proposed its own reference version, but left ample room for AIB partners to present their own video card with very different operating frequencies.

Having had the opportunity to test the 40nm TSMC manufacturing process for the GF114, NVIDIA has decided to use even those GPUs that have shown some problems and were not suitable to be fitted in the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.This was achieved by turning off part of the stream processors so to reuse the discarded chips on the new GTX 560.