I should pause to explain the asterisk next to the unexpectedly low estimate for the GF100's double-precision performance. By all rights, in this architecture, double-precision math should happen at half the speed of single-precision, clean and simple. However,
Nvidia has made the decision to limit DP performance in the GeForce versions of the GF100 to 64 FMA ops per clock—one fourth of what the chip can do. This is presumably a product positioning decision intended to encourage serious compute customers to purchase a Tesla version of the GPU instead. Double-precision support doesn't appear to be of any use for real-time graphics, and I doubt many serious GPU-computing customers will want the peak DP rates without the ECC memory that the Tesla cards will provide. But a few poor hackers in Eastern Europe are going to be seriously bummed, and this does mean the Radeon HD 5870 will be substantially faster than any GeForce card at double-precision math, at least in terms of peak rates.
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