Despite constant rumours that Nvidia is focusing on the potentially lucrative HPC industry with Fermi - rather than gaming - company spokesperson Bryan Del Rizzo dismisses such rumours as "unfounded" and "ludicrous".

"Gaming remains our bread and butter focus area. However, there are other opportunities for us to explore as the company grows, such as the HPC sector," explained Del Rizzo.

The reason why all details on Fermi so far points towards a focus on compute processing rather than gaming graphics is probably because the two events that have covered Fermi - GTC and SC '09 are both compute oriented. Del Rizzo insists Nvidia have still not revealed "a lot" of details about the gaming capabilities of Fermi.

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ATI's much anticipated and slightly delayed Hemlock - Radeon HD 5970 is here. To be honest, there are really no notable surprises surrounding this release.

Our forum member, adrianlee, has once again created a comprehensive list of reviews across the web. However, the HD 5970 is something more. It is not just about benchmarks and numbers.


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Following the release of ATI's flagship Hemlock, we first witnessed the first picture of a working Fermi based Geforce system, and now at SC '09, Nvidia have demonstrated Fermi going up against GT200. All in one day!

The demonstration is a N-body simulation running on CUDA with 20,480 body interactions in double precision. This demonstration was designed to show off Fermi's massive DP performance increase over GT200. Of course, being a supercomputing conference, these results are hardly relevent for gaming. The GT200 GPU was a Tesla C1060 and the Fermi was an Tesla 20 sample. The results? 3.5 fps for the C1060, 21.72 fps for Fermi.

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Finally, we have a picture of what looks like real Fermi based Geforce product rendering graphics! Probably not a co-incidence it was revealed on the same day as AMD's Radeon HD 5970 release.

The picture, posted on Nvidia's Facebook page, is of a GF100 product running Unigine's Heaven DX11 benchmark. Visually, the card look similar to current GTX 260/275/285 products.

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MSI introduces the world’s first graphics card to support overvoltage functionality: the N240GT series. The N240GT-MD512-OC/D5 and N240GT-MD1G allow the user to adjust GPU voltage and the overclocking configurations via MSI Afterburner overclocking software allowing OC potential up to 30%. MSI’s N240GT series of graphics cards implements the military class components:Hi-c CAPs, solid state capicators and solid state chokes to handle higher power flows for even better overclocking capability.

While we are only a few hours away from the official release, there's information galore for the impatient of us. Like they did with the HD 5800 launch, Czechgamer are back with more leaked slides. First up, the final heatsink is indeed much like the HD 5800/5770, just a larger version. The clock speeds, as expected are 725 MHz and 4000 Mhz for the core and memory respectively. TDP is 294W, with an idle power of a paltry 42W! Quite brilliant for a dual-GPU monster.

Galaxy releases the new GeForce GT240 D5 and Galaxy GeForce GT240 D3 with 1GB/512MB. It is based on 40nm process with 96 stream processors, 128-bit memory interface, 512MB GDDR3/5 memory. The cards come with its own custom cooler to keep the GPU operating 10-15 degrees lower than the standard cooling system.

We all know it is constantly being delayed - but at the end of all those delays, what we were expecting was a stellar product from Nvidia. However, with today's press release, certain inconvenient details are revealed. Let's forget about the delays for now, and just consider the product itself.

The first Fermi GPU - GF100 - as we know for a while now, is a 3 billion transistor giant, taking a die size of around 500 mm². Compare this with the 2.15 billion transistor, 330 mm² Cypress on the same 40nm TSMC process, and you would be expecting a different class of product. Unfortunately, the details revealed today about cast an uncertain shadow over this basic assumption.

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Nvidia have "paper launched" the HPC version of its next-generation Fermi architecture. Branded as Tesla 20 series, the HPC GPGPUs will release in Q2 2010. Like the Tesla 10 series based on GT200, Tesla 20 will feature single GPU and four GPU options.

The single GPU will come in to variants - C2050 and C2070, with upto 3GB and 6GB GDDR5 memory respectively (with ECC enabled, 2.6GB and 5.2GB). The prices? An enormous $2,499 and $3,999, respectively.

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We are less than two days away from the big launch of AMD's current generation flagship - Hemlock, or to be branded as ATI Radeon HD 5970. As we know, the HD 5970 is basically two Cypress dies from the HD 5870 on one PCB, much like the HD 4870 X2 was to RV770. HD 5870's TDP does end up at 188W, nearly 30W higher than the HD 4870. Thus, to comply with PCI SIG standards, AMD have reportedly downclocked the GPU to 725 MHz and 4000 MHz for the memory. The full complement of 1600 shaders each is retained.

The TDP, as expected, is just below 300W, with Fudzilla reporting 294W. This is exactly where we would expect it to be - contrary to earlier rumours of >300W. The HD 5970 packs 40 SIMD units, 3200 shader units, 160 TMU and 64 ROP in total, with a theoretical computer performance of an amazing 4.64 TFlops.

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