NVIDIA ‘Kepler’ GK104 Die Said To Be Smaller Than AMD Radeon HD 7900 ‘Tahiti’ Die
Charlie Demerjian over at SemiAccurate says that he was shown an NVIDIA Kepler GK104 GPU! He says that the GK104 chip will be around 18-19mm x 18-19mm in size, which means that the die size will be between 324-361 mm^2. This is interesting if it is true as the AMD ‘Tahiti’ core that is used on the Southern Islands lineup (Radeon HD 7900 Series) is 365mm^2. Rumor has it that the TDP on the GK104 will be somewhere around 225W with the 28nm manufacturing process. The TDP on the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is 250W and 200W on the Radeon HD 7950. Charlie mentioned that the NVIDIA GK104 might be done by late March, so things are going to get really interesting in the video card market. Will NVIDIA take the performance crown back from AMD? If the cards using GK104 come out at the rumored $299 price point, it might turn the GPU market upside down. We won’t say that NVIDIA has a performance segment killer yet, but it looks like they are cooking up something really interesting.
The chip we saw is roughly 18-19mm * 18-19mm, putting the range from 324-361mm^2. If you assume it is both square and in the middle, 342mm^2 wouldnt be a bad number to plug in to the spreadsheets. While this is a lot bigger than we were expecting, it is still smaller than Tahiti by an appreciable margin. If performance ends up about where we have been told, it will be about as efficient as AMDs current chips at a lot lower power draw. If the price holds up too, GK104 will own the mid-market, aka where the money is. Net result, if Nvidia can get it to yield, power use stays where it is now, as do clocks, and they dont get greedy with the price, well, three of four isnt a bad tally.
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