jmke

It designed a chip that was more or less unmanufacturable, and we have been saying as much for more than six months now. It is big, 530mm^2 at the minimum, likely 10+mm^2 more, and way too hot. The 448 SP version is listed at 225W TDP, 190W 'typical', and that is with 14 of the 16 shader clusters clusters fused off. With them on, it would likely be well above 250W, far too hot for a single GPU card.

Then there is the whole problem of 512 SPs promised versus 448 SPs delivered. Fermi is arranged as 16 clusters of 32 shaders, and given that it is turning off 64 shaders, it looks like the minimum granularity it can fuse off is a single cluster of 32. This means it is having problems getting less than two unrecoverable errors per die, not a good sign.


http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/12/...-fermi-448sps/

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