NVIDIA GT212 - 1.8 billion transistors, 384 shaders?

[Andreas G]

NVIDIA GT212 is rumored to be the next high-end chip from NVIDIA. Most seem to indicate that this chip will be made with the TSMC 40nm manufacturing process, but the exact specifications have remained clouded. According to a source to hardware-infos, the chip will trump the 1.4 billion transistors of GT200 with another 400 million adding up to 1.8 billion all in all. They also claim that the number of shaders will be upgraded to 384 by adding to extra clusters of shaders and upgrading each cluster from 24 to 32 shaders.

The number of TMUs will increase accordingly to 96, an additional 8 per extra cluster. The source also claims that NVIDIA will now get access to GDDR5 and will GT212 will have it. In that case NVIDIA will be able to reduce the memory controller to 256-bit and that should make the chip smaller. Bringing the GT2xx architecture to the 40nm half-node will supposedly shrink the chip to less than 300mm˛. No word on the power consumption. We expect the card to launch in the second quarter.

We have no confirmation to this information so consider it with a truckload of salt.