The Fermi Architecture The GeForce GTX 400/500 family of GPUs is based on NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture—the most significant leap in GPU architecture since the original G80. G80 was our initial vision of what a unified graphics and compute processor should look like. GT200 extended the performance and functionality of G80. With Fermi, we have taken all we have learned from the two prior processors, analyzed the various applications that were written for them, and developed a completely new architecture optimized for next generation games and applications. Parallel Tessellation Engines Traditional GPU designs use a single geometry engine to perform tessellation. Jackson guitars made in japan serial numbers in excel. This approach is analogous to early GPU designs which used a single pixel pipeline to perform pixel shading. Having observed how pixel pipelines grew from a single unit to many parallel units and its subsequent impact on 3D realism, we designed our tessellation architecture to be parallel from day one.

The international team who built and operate the Large Area Telescope, one of two instruments on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (often known simply as Fermi), will have a meeting at CERN (the European particle accelerator facility that runs the Large Hadron Collider).

Fermi GPUs implement up to sixteen parallel tessellation units, each with its own dedicated shading resources. Up to four parallel Raster Engines transform newly tessellated triangles into a fine stream of pixels for shading. The close coupling for tessellation, rasterization, and shading units provides enormous on-chip bandwidth and high execution efficiency. The result is a breakthrough in tessellation performance at up to two billion triangles per second.

Compared to competing products, Fermi GPUs are up to 8x faster as measured by independent reviews using Microsoft’s DirectX 11 software development kit. Third Generation Streaming Multiprocessor Fermi’s third generation Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) introduces several architectural innovations that improve both the performance and accurancy of complex graphics and compute work loads.

Each of Fermi’s SMs contains 32 CUDA processors—a fourfold increase over prior SM designs. By employing a flexible scalar architecture, CUDA cores achieve full performance on a variety of workloads such as textures, shadow maps, and complex shaders. The result is consistently high performance in current as well as future games. Each CUDA processor has a fully pipelined integer arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and floating point unit (FPU).

The FPU complies with the IEEE 754-2008 industry standard for floating-point arithmetic, the same standard used by the world’s premier computer scientists and research institutions. Fermi applies this high standard of precision for all workloads, be it in games, video transcoding, or desktop applications.