GeForce GTX 200 GPU Architecture
GeForce GTX 200 GPUs are the first to implement NVIDIA’s second-generation
unified shader and compute architecture. The GeForce GTX 200 GPUs include
significantly enhanced features and deliver, on average, 1.5× the performance of
GeForce 8 or 9 Series GPUs.
Manufactured using TSMC’s 65 nm fabrication process, GeForce GTX 200 GPUs
include 1.4 billion transistors and are the largest, most powerful, and most complex
GPU ever made. All GTX 200 GPUs are built to operate comfortably within the
power and heat specifications of high-end PCs.
You may recall that the first-generation NVIDIA unified visual computing
architecture in GeForce 8 and 9 Series GPUs was based on a Scalable Processor
Array (SPA) framework. The second-generation architecture in GeForce GTX 200
GPUs is based on a reengineered, enhanced, and extended SPA architecture.
The SPA architecture consists of a number of TPCs, which stands for “Texture
Processing Clusters” in graphics processing mode, and “Thread Processing
Clusters” in parallel compute mode. Each TPC is in turn made up of a number of
streaming multiprocessors (SMs), and each SM contains eight processor cores (also
called streaming processors (SPs) or thread processors). Every SM also includes
texture filtering processors used in graphics processing, but also useful for various
filtering operations in compute mode, such as filtering images as they are zoomed in
and out.
More Processor Cores
The new second-generation SPA architecture in the GeForce GTX 280 improves
performance compared to the prior generation G80 and G92 designs on two levels.
First, it increases the number of SMs per TPC from two to three. Second, it
increases the maximum number of TPCs per chip from 8 to 10. The effect is
multiplicative, resulting in 240 processor cores.
Chip
TPCs
SMs per
TPC
SPs per SM
Total SPs
GeForce 8 & 9
Series
8 2 8 128
GeForce GTX
200 GPUs
10 3 8 240
Table 1: Number of GPU Processing Cores
May 2008 | TB-04044-001_v01
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