The weeks leading up to a major GPU launch are mighty interesting, aren't they?
With AMD and NVIDIA locking horns for as long as we care to remember, next week's arrival of the Radeon HD 6800 series - followed by the Radeon HD 6900 range in November - was never going to go unanswered by the Green Team.
According to the latest speculation, NVIDIA's retort will land in December in the form of the GeForce GTX 580.
Said to be a show-stopping high-end monstrosity, the card will finally show off a Fermi product with a full 512 CUDA cores, but the rumour mill reckons there's more to it than that.
The GTX 580's core - dubbed the GF110 - is rumoured to feature four re-jigged Graphics Processing Clusters. Each of these contains four revised Streaming Multiprocessors, all of which are armed with eight texture units - that's up from four on GF100.
Adding the numbers up spews out a card with 512 cores, 128 texture units and a speculative 512-bit memory bus.
Fact or fiction? We've always maintained that a full-fat, 512-core Fermi graphics card would see the light of day, but this supposed GeForce GTX 580 seems a little bit far fetched. Only time will tell, but it's certainly going to be an interesting end to the year.
