There's no denying that NVIDIA needs to bring Fermi down to the mid-to-high-end space, and early rumours suggest it'll happen in less than two months.
That's according to Chinese website Expreview.com, whose "reliable sources" claim a toned-down Fermi product dubbed the GeForce GTX 460 will debut on June 1st.
Take the date with a pinch of salt, but it doesn't take a reliable source to speculate that NVIDIA's next Fermi derivative will launch at COMPUTEX - which just so happens to run from June 1st to June 5th.
What's potentially interesting is that the card is said to utilise the same PCB as the GTX 470, but features 1GB of GDDR5 memory connected via a 256-bit bus and presumably cuts across the board.
Putting our speculation hats on, we're going to attempt to take an educated guess at potential specifications.
| Graphics cards | GeForce GTX 480 (1,536MB) |
GeForce GTX 470 (1,280MB) |
GeForce GTX 460* (1,024MB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU clock | 700MHz | 607MHz | 500-600MHz ? |
| Stream processors | 480 | 448 | 384 ? |
| Stream processor clock | 1,401MHz | 1,215MHz | 1,000-1,200MHz ? |
| Memory clock (effective) | 3,696MHz | 3,348MHz | 3,348MHz ? |
| Memory interface | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit ? |
| Memory size | 1,536MB GDDR5 | 1,280MB GDDR5 | 1,024MB GDDR5 ? |
| Manufacturing process | TSMC, 40nm | TSMC, 40nm | TSMC, 40nm |
| DirectX/ Shader Model | DX11, 5.0 | DX11, 5.0 | DX11, 5.0 |
| ROPs | 48 |
40 |
32 ? |
| Board power (max) | 250W | 215W | <200W ? |
| Board length | 10.5in | 9.5in | 9.5in ? |
| Connectors (native) | 2x
dual-link DVI Mini-HDMI |
2x
dual-link DVI Mini-HDMI |
2x
dual-link DVI Mini-HDMI |
| Retail price | £430 | £300 | £225 ? |
*unconfirmed product, best-guess specification |
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Something like the above seems feasible, and the suggested specification would put the card up against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5850.
Question is, could a GeForce GTX 460 match the Radeon HD 5850's £225 asking price?
