GT300 Taped out

[Kal-EL]

http://brightsideofnews.com/ThumbL.aspx?file=/Data/2009_5_16/nVidia-GT300-already-taped-out2c-A1-silicon-in-Santa-Clara\nvidia_GT300_215.jpg
nVidia G(T)300 already taped out, A1 silicon in Santa Clara
5/16/2009 by: Theo Valich - Get more from this author (http://www.overclockaholics.com/author/2009/5/16/nvidia-g(t)300-already-taped-out2c-a1-silicon-in-santa-clara.aspx)



According to our sources, nVidia got the silicon a while ago, meaning that the chip taped out between January and March. The silicon is A1, but neither of our sources wanted to confirm is this the final silicon or will nVidia be forced to tape out A2 silicon to get production-grade yields. We heard that both ATI and nVidia have issues with TSMC's 40nm, and both companies are testing with the alternative company. If 40nm production yields don't satisfy, expect 32nm bulk silicon parts coming out of a certain Foundry with Global intentions sooner than later.
The specifications are identical to the rumored ones - given that now we have multiple sources close to the heart of the company confirming the specifications to us, we now feel comfortable and no longer consider GT300 information to be in the rumor territory.
512 cores, 512-bit memory controller (http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/22/nvidias-gt300-specifications-revealed---its-a-cgpu!.aspx), 256GB/s to 280GB/s of bandwidth on the non-overclocked parts (http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/5/5/gt300-to-feature-512-bit-interface---nvidia-set-to-continue-with-complicated-controllers.aspx).
BTW, to avoid any confusion about the GT300 or GeForce GTX300 series, nVidia's GT300 chip has several codenames. The GT300 silicon is destined to become a Tesla part; G300 is the desktop GeForce card, while G300GL is upcoming Quadro part. nVidia's old-timers still call the chip NV70 and if you roam in the halls of Graphzilla's Building C in Santa Clara, you might find papers with NV70 all over it. nVidia's current parts, the GeForce GTX 285 are all based on NV65 chips.
We saw how the board looks like and there are plenty of surprises coming to all the nay-sayers - expect world-wide hardware media going into a frenzy competition who will score the first picture of GT300 board. If not in the next couple of days, expect GT300 pictures coming online during Computex.
According to our sources, nVidia has no plans to show the GT300to the stockholders, analysts and the selected invited press [no, we're not in that club], but you can expect that Jen-Hsun and the rest of the exec gang will be bullish about their upcoming products.
Watch this space. http://brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/5/16/nvidia-g(t)300-already-taped-out2c-a1-silicon-in-santa-clara.aspx

[Kal-EL]

additional info from BSN:
http://www.overclockaholics.com/ThumbL.aspx?file=/Data/2009_5_18/nVidia-GeForce-GTX380-clocks-leak-out\nvidia_GT300_215.jpg
nVidia GeForce "GTX380" clocks leak out?
5/18/2009 by: Theo Valich - Get more from this author (http://www.overclockaholics.com/author/2009/5/18/nvidia-geforce-gtx380-clocks-leak-out.aspx)



We decided to start Monday on a different scale - your Ed-in-Chief woke up at 2AM European time, just in time for Asia to wake up... and we decided to hear all that we can from interested parties. Information we received was quite interesting - companies know that nVidia has the samples of NV70/G300/GT300 silicon, but they were not delivered through usual sources - which would explain the lack of pictures coming from Chinese websites.
As usual, nVidia is keeping their partners in the dark, but there is a certain power struggle between the companies, with questions flying left and right - in fact, we heard partners repeating the information that originated from our site. At recent annual shin-ding (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shin-ding) for partners, nVidia was cocky and claimed that the company call help the partners out of the crisis. The GT300 just might be the reason for over-confidence typical when nVidia has a strong part coming out.
First internal cards are based on A1-stepping and feature 1024MB of GDDR5 memory, with all the memory chips located on front of the card. There are also cards with 2048MB, but we were unable to confirm the codename for the 2GB board. Oddly enough, the 1GB card has a codename fitting nicely in the current line-up, even behind one upcoming dual-GPU single-PC part, which would imply that nVidia has the cards for several weeks now.
According to the German site Hardware-Infos (http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=2954), the sample boards now come with a higher GPU clock. The alleged GT300 A1 silicon ticks at 0.7 GHz, with 512 cores working at 1.6 GHz. GDDR5 memory was upped to 1.1 GHz QDR or 4.4 GT/s [billion transfers per second], resulting in memory bandwidth of massive 281.6 GB/s. According to information we had, nVidia firstly clocked the at 1:1 ratio with GeForce GTX280 for a baseline comparison. If the leaked informationis true and those clocks remain final, that would mean GTX380 missed it targeted clock by a double-digit percentage. Still, a beast nevertheless.
If the figure of 1.6 GHz for 512 shaders is final, then the chip can achieve 2457 GFLOPS, e.g. 2.46 TFLOPS. This is a very good jump from 933 GFLOPS on the original GTX280. But the dark horse here is not the single-precision score, but rather the efficiency of dual-precision format. If our sources were true, GT300 chip has radically improved way of calculating dual precision operations and should bring anywhere between 7-10x improvement in performance. Given that ATI's Radeon 4800 series destroyed GT200 series in dual-precision, we are not surprised to hear about large improvements in DP performance.