After ATI released the fastest Graphics card ever aka ATI 5970, Nvidia lagged behind the war between the titans in the graphics card segment and there was no news on when the GTX 300 would be made out.Nvidia didn’t show anything on the typical consumer side, but rather for Supers (HPCs), they gave AMD a big hit.But at this year’s SC09 supercomputing trade show in Portland, Oregon, Nvidia unveils its plan for the next-gen Chip ‘Fermi’. Overall, the GPU co-processors aimed at personal supers and massive clusters were the stars of the show. This is something much more powerful than AMD’s Fusion.

The video card versions of the Fermi chips will be called the GeForce 300 M. Nvidia  is keeping the Tesla brand for its next generation GPU co-processors for workstations and servers. The Fermi chips will be sold under the Tesla 20 brand.RegHarware talked about the specs and hardware.

Andy Keane, GM at Tesla supercomputing (Nvidia)  said, the Tesla 20 cards will come in 2 flavors. Nvidia will sell co-processor systems that can plug right into HPC clusters and link to servers through PCI-Express 2.0 links – and at around 130 watts. Keane bristles at anyone who claims that a fully burdened heat budget for a server – not just a microprocessor, but its memory controller (if it is not integrated), its chipset, and its memory – will be any lower.

What you can expect With the Fermi family of GPUs is, addition of L1 and L2 caches to the co-processors along with putting ECC memory scrubbing on internal GDDR5 video memory on the card as well as accesses to external server memory. This ECC support, as it turns out, is as important as anything else in the chip if you want to sell GPUs to nuke labs.

The Fermi chip has 512 cores, which is more than twice the cores of the first Tesla GPUs. The Fermis bundle 32 cores together into a streaming multiprocessor that has 64 KB of shared L1 cache. All 512 cores have access to a shared 768 KB L2 cache, and they support the IEEE 754-2008 double precision floating point standard.

In theory, the Fermi chip can address up to 1 TB of memory, but the Tesla C2050 GPU co-processor has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory and double precision floating point performance of 520 gigaflops, costs $2,499. The Tesla C2070 GPU has 6 GB of GDDR5 memory and is rated at 630 gigaflops, costs $3,999. The bang for the buck is best with the smaller unit, which weighs in at $4.81 per gigaflops compared to the $6.35 per gigaflops of the faster GPU.

On the higher Front, a 1U appliance with four of the faster C2070 GPUs delivers 2.52 teraflops of double-precision floating point performance and costs $18,995, or $7.54 per gigaflops.

Two types of GPU would be made available.First one, they will now support Nvidia’s C++ compiler (not just C).Secondly, a set of new InfiniBand and Tesla drivers that InfiniBand chip maker Mellanox and Nvidia have got together to streamline the movement of data from the InfiniBand ports, to the CPU’s main memory, and then down through the PCI-Express bus to the GPU card.How this process works is as follows.

Data comes in over InfiniBand, works its way into main memory and is copied; before it is moved down to the GPU, it is copied again and that copy is what is moved. The driver changes allow for the data moved into memory to be moved down to the GPU in one fell swoop.What do we get from this  ? They have been able to boost a 30% increase in speed.The Tesla 20 GPU co-processors & the appliances based on them will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2010. The GeForce graphics cards based on the same GPU chips will be seen around first quarter.