Sunday, September 2nd 2012
NVIDIA GK106 GPU Pictured, GeForce GTX 660 Benchmarked
Here are some of the first pictures of NVIDIA's upcoming GK106 silicon, which goes into building the GeForce GTX 660 graphics card. The GK106, built on the 28 nm silicon fab process, is poised to be NVIDIA's newest mainstream-performance chip that succeeds the GF116. The pictures reveal the chip package to be almost as big as the GF116 but smaller than the GK104. This can be attributed to fewer memory I/O pins (192-bit maximum bus width).
The rectangular die of the GK106 appears to have roughly the same area as that of the GF116, but with the higher transistor density of the 28 nm process, one can expect a significantly higher transistor count for the chip. If some of the pictures we're seeing are any indication the GK106 will be extremely energy-efficient, as an unknown graphics card based on it draws power from just one 6-pin power connector.According to the specifications leaked from various sources, some of which include the source of these pictures, the GK106 as GeForce GTX 660 features 960 CUDA cores, 24 ROPs, and a 192-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB memory. The card could ship with clock speeds of 980 MHz core, 1033 MHz GPU Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory. At reference speeds and on-spec voltage, the chip could feature a typical power draw of 140W, which explains the need for just one 6-pin power connector.
Some of the sources managed to get a GeForce GTX 660 sample running with GeForce 305.27 beta drivers, and put it through 3DMark 11. Below are the GPU-Z screenshot (with some fields blanked out by the source), 3DMark 11 Performance preset and 3DMark 11 eXtreme preset numbers.
The rectangular die of the GK106 appears to have roughly the same area as that of the GF116, but with the higher transistor density of the 28 nm process, one can expect a significantly higher transistor count for the chip. If some of the pictures we're seeing are any indication the GK106 will be extremely energy-efficient, as an unknown graphics card based on it draws power from just one 6-pin power connector.According to the specifications leaked from various sources, some of which include the source of these pictures, the GK106 as GeForce GTX 660 features 960 CUDA cores, 24 ROPs, and a 192-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB memory. The card could ship with clock speeds of 980 MHz core, 1033 MHz GPU Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory. At reference speeds and on-spec voltage, the chip could feature a typical power draw of 140W, which explains the need for just one 6-pin power connector.
Some of the sources managed to get a GeForce GTX 660 sample running with GeForce 305.27 beta drivers, and put it through 3DMark 11. Below are the GPU-Z screenshot (with some fields blanked out by the source), 3DMark 11 Performance preset and 3DMark 11 eXtreme preset numbers.