Nvidia Dives Deeper into Supercomputing with Fermi

By Geoff Duncan
October 01, 2009

Everyone knows GPUs do some serious number crunching, but Nvidia is pretty much convinced its ready to take on traditional supercomputers...at a tenth the cost.

Graphics technology developer Nvidia has formally introduced its next generation graphics architecture, codenamed Fermi, which Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang described as putting a supercomputer into a GPU. Unlike traditional GPUs, which are optimized for rendering and graphics tasks, the Fermi architecture is intended to put standard computing operations and graphics procedures on equal footing, enabling developers to leverage the computing power of the GPUs for things like physics simulation, supercomputing, and medical imaging…and, of course, there will still be some applications for gaming.

The Fermi chip currently sports some 3 billion transistors—which compares to 2.3 billion in Intel's quad-core Itanium and eight-core Nehalem-EX CPUs—and 512 cores, offering eight times the double-precision floating-point performance of previous generations: fast floating point operations are key ...

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