Stefan Mileschin

Ahead of its launch later this week, even more details of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 980, and the 28 nm "GM204" silicon it's based on, tumbled out. To begin with, the GM204 silicon is confirmed to be built on the 28 nm silicon fab process. The chip bigger than that of the GK104, with a die area of 398 mm², yet smaller than the GK110, which measures 581 mm². Its transistor count is 5.2 billion, about 2 billion more than the GK104.

The component hierarchy of GM204 is similar to that of the GM107 silicon, on which the GTX 750 Ti is based. The GPU features a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, and PCI-Express 3.0 x16 bus. The GigaThread Engine dispatches workload between four graphics processing clusters (GPCs), the basic subunit. Each GPC has a common raster engine shared between four streaming multiprocessors Maxwell (SMMs), which each hold 128 CUDA cores. The total CUDA core count is hence 2,048. The L2 cache has been quadrupled over GK104. The chip features 2 MB of it, compared to 512 KB on its predecessor. The GM204 features 64 ROPs, double that of the GK104, and should hence should come with a strong geometry processing muscle. The chip features a revolutionary new 3-bit delta color compression technology that makes the most of the limited memory bus width of this chip.

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