Quote Originally Posted by tajoh111 View Post
What NV needs to do is increase their transistor efficiency up and get it size down. 1.95 billion transistors should take up less room up than cypress' 2.15 billion transistor and the fact that it is either matching that size or taking up more room show that NV needs to get this process down better.

I think it is too early to say that a 576 shader NV part would only match cayman not knowing the performance of both. Considering nothing is confirmed at this point, it impossible to say anything about the performance relation of two unreleased part with none of the specs really confirmed.
Yeah i concede that my post is mostly based on speculations, and Cayman prediction might be a bit further on the optimist side, but i digress. Atleast with Cayman we will see it in reality soon enough while everything on the green side is based on total speculation, so i don't think i'm going overboard with my previous post. Nothing is really concrete at the moment so everything is a guesswork. But my diesize comment stands on its own right.

Regarding design efficiency, GF 104 is already stripped of many GF 100 GPGPU emphasis, so i don't think nVidia has got anymore room to maneouvre in this current process node, they have to wait until 28 nm process round arrives. To make this new giant chip possible & feasible (ready in Q1 2011), they have to make it ASAP, without much redesigning & developing, just blow GF 104 specs 50% up and diesize 40% up, bingo !

Just make sure you can manufacture the full chip right from the start at decent yield, otherwise ..... I want good competition from both side of fences and if it takes a ~520 mm^2 250 w chip from the greenside to match/beat Cayman, so be it.

Quote Originally Posted by hurleybird View Post
Yeah, 367 has to be minimum. Even with 380mm2 G104 has better density than GF106. Another possibilty is that more is disabled in GF106 than a 64-bit memory controller, but probably not.

I don't think that's likely to happen in the near future though. Even GF106 has disabled parts, and GF100 is already at (or close to) a power wall. I'm sure they can still push the boundaries a little bit with their current tech, but not enough to catch NI unless NI itself is a very minor improvement.

With any luck, Nvidia can pull some kind of RV770 where they shrink the shaders, improve their density, and are able to fit a lot more slightly less powerfull shaders in the same area.

Otherwise, I'm thinking that Nvidia will need to make seperate gaming GPU and GPGPU architectures to be competitive. GF104 vs. GF100 seem to be going this route already in a minimal way.
Bro, while nVidia management currently acts like idiots, i still believe there are plenty of good engineers in that house, so while RV 770 green edition is quite unlikely in this same 40 nm node, a decent yielding 150% version of GF 104 is IMHO still within reach for these guys to develop, sooner than later. Yeah, the chip might be GF 100 sized, but efficiency (perf/watt & perf/area) IMHO will increase somewhat, and the chip will be manufacturable.