I have no doubt there will be a dual GF104 card. I'm just saying take Fudzilla with a grain of salt.
GTX 485 doesn't make sense right now. With the GF104 there are 48 more shaders to add. Add those plus possibly a larger memory bus and performance will come between a 470 and 480 with most likely better power characteristics. If there will be a 485, it's a GPU no one has seen yet.
No larger memory bus erocker, not on this one at least. Unless all the info and diagrams around the net are completely wrong. GF104 is a 256bit part. Seeing the small difference between 192bit and 256bit 460s I don't think more than 256 bit is required anyway. Higher memory clock will just make it.
Regarding the 485, it is very very very very (did I say very?) unlikely, but it could be based on some kind of GF100 respin. Yeah many people have said it would make little sense, but that was before they've seen that the architecture actually works like expected. Goig for a respin when you don't know if it will make a difference is just a very risky and expensive move, but now it makes all the sense. GF104 is a fixed Fermi, they would just need to kinda add the 50% they just cut for GF104 back.
Or another alternative would be to use exactly the same architecture found in GF104 but with 3 clusters instead of two and go back to 384 bit. That way they would be again into the 3 billion transistor realms since you are adding exactly 50%, GF104 has 1950 million transistors + half of that = almost 3 billion (versus 3.1 billion in GF100). Biggest differences:
- Based on an architecture that actually works like expected.
- Maybe higher clocks possible. Like 750Mhz for the high end SKU and 650 for the harvested one.
- Good power consumption. Add 50% to the 150w the GTX460 consumes give or take.
- 384 + 192 = 576 SPs
And 96 TMUs. (50% more than GF100, biggest flaw IMO)
If there will be a 485, it's a GPU no one has seen yet.
It wouldn't be so strange for such a chip to exist without our knowledge. Think about this: who is the person that most talks (knows?) about future releases? C.Demerjian. Now, how much have we heard about GTx460 from him,
appart from this? After that he went completely mute, probably because he actually got some true info and was not what he wanted to hear. In the linked article dated 1 month ago, he knew jack and off whatever truth he actually knew, he would never say. So if Nvidia was making something in the lines of what I described above, do you think we would ever hear about it? Other typical sources with early Nvidia info are usually close to Nvidia and biased a bit, it might be in Nvidia's interest to hyde such a chip if it actually exists, so they would not announce anything yet.