World's Fastest GPU GTX 580 Launches, Prices Float at Around $520

From DailyTech: Today NVIDIA officially launched the GTX 580, the first card in its Geforce 500 Series. Like AMD's Radeon 6000 series, the Geforce 500 series isn't a major architecture design and is still produced on the same 40 nm process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd.

Despite the fact that the card itself isn't exactly earth-shaking, this launch is clearly a big deal for NVIDIA, as it represents the company closing the gap on release time with AMD. And the card reportedly picks up right where NVIDIA left off, boosting the company's high end performance even higher.

The Geforce GTX 580 is absolutely a performance beast. In some regards, it is basically an overclocked GTX 480. But it also bumps the Shader Processor (aka "CUDA core") from 480 (with the GTX 480) to 512. It also tacks on 4 extra "Special Function Units", taking the total to 64.

The die size has actually shrunk slightly to 520 mm^2, while the transistor count stayed steady at 3 billion.

Clock speeds have been bumped up across the board. The standard core clock jumps from 700 MHz to 772 MHz. The shade clock is bumped from 1.401 GHz to 1.544 GHz. And the GDDR5 memory clock is pushed from 3.696 GHz to 4.008 GHz.

NVIDIA dubs the new architecture GF110, but essential this appears to be very similar to the GF100 architecture in the GTX 480.

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