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NVIDIA Unveils Dual-GPU Powered GeForce GTX 690
MojoKid writes "Today at the GeForce LAN taking place in Shanghai, NVIDIA's CEO Jen Hsun Huang unveiled the company's upcoming dual-GPU powered, flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 690. The GeForce GTX 690 will feature a pair of fully-functional GK104 "Kepler" GPUs. If you recall, the GK104 is the chip powering the GeForce GTX 680, which debuted just last month. On the upcoming GeForce GTX 690, each of the GK104 GPUs will also be paired to its own 2GB of memory (4GB total) via a 256-bit interface, resulting in what is essentially GeForce GTX 680 SLI on a single card. The GPUs on the GTX 690 will be linked to each other via a PCI Express 3.0 switch from PLX, with a full 16 lanes of electrical connectivity between each GPU and the PEG slot. Previous dual-GPU powered cards from NVIDIA relied on the company's own NF200, but that chip lacks support for PCI Express 3.0, so NVIDIA opted for a third party solution this time around."
But can it mine bitcoins?
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
That connector is digital only. The extra pins are for analog signal.
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Mine sweeper is going to look great on this thing!
They're all dual-link (at least the connectors are - that doesn't guarantee the hardware behind them is). Single-link connectors have two blocks of nine pins on each side, and the middle block of nine pins is only on dual-link connectors. The top connector is dual-link DVI-D, while the others are dual-link DVI-I. A DVI-D port will not support a VGA adapter.
Except Nvidia has had SLI based multi gpu boards since at least the 8000 series, whereas 3dfx hit the limits of their Voodoo architecture, and required external wall power by the time Voodoo5 came out, and for all the extra hassle, you had a card that performed about as well as a GeForce256, but which also took a spot on your power strip. That's why 3dfx died, not because of SLI boards.
That's what I'm waiting for as well. Nvidia got pretty lucky with GK104. Most speculation is that it was intended to be the GTX 660 and GK110 was supposed to be the 680. However, GK104 was faster than AMD's fastest offering so why not sell it as a 680. The specs for GK110 "Big Fermi" are pretty intimidating and worth waiting for. I was also dissatisfied with 2 GB of memory for GK104, there are 4 gb cards coming out but they're around 800 bucks. GK110 will come with 4 gb standard.
I do have to hand it to Nvidia. The power requirements for the current 680 are very low and performance is quite impressive but GK 110 is going to be a monster...
They are. However, their relative FP64 performance has dropped compared to the previous generation. If I remember correctly, there is now separate silicon to do FP64, rather than just a modified path in the FP32 cores. In the previous architecture, we were down to 1/12 of FP32 performance, only a third of some of the Fermi chip cores could do FP64, and at half speed. In the new chip, the FP64 cores can do full-speed calculations, but there are only 8 such cores, versus 192 conventional cores, giving a 1/24 performance ration.
However, Ryan Smith at Anandtech speculated that the existence of dedicated FP64 cores means that a future Fermi based on Kepler will be a mean beast, if they do a tape-out with exclusively FP64 cores. The only thing holding back double-precision then will be memory bandwidth (which would be a large enough deterrent in many cases).