NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560: The Top To Bottom Factory Overclock

NVIDIA’s GF104 and GF114 GPUs have been a solid success for the company so far. 10 months after GF104 launched the GTX 460 series, NVIDIA has slowly been supplementing and replacing their former $200 king. In January we saw the launch of the GF114 based GTX 560 Ti, which gave us our first look at what a fully enabled GF1x4 GPU could do. However the GTX 560 Ti was positioned above the GTX 460 series in both performance and price, so it was more an addition to their lineup than a replacement for GTX 460.

With each GF11x GPU effectively being a half-step above its GF10x predecessor, NVIDIA’s replacement strategy has been to split a 400 series card’s original market between two GF11x GPUs. For the GTX 460, on the low-end this was partially split off into the GTX 550 Ti, which came fairly close to the GTX 460 768MB’s performance. The GTX 460 1GB has remained in place however, and today NVIDIA is finally starting to change that with the GeForce GTX 560. Based upon the same GF114 GPU as the GTX 560 Ti, the GTX 560 will be the GTX 460 1GB’s eventual high-end successor and NVIDIA’s new $200 card.

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NVIDIA's Project Kal-El: Quad-Core A9s Coming to Smartphones/Tablets This Year

NVIDIA just dropped a bombshell. Not only is its third generation Tegra architecture, codenamed Kal-El, back from the fab but it's up and running Android after only 12 days. Kal-El will begin sampling soon and NVIDIA claims you'll be able to buy tablets based on it in August of this year, with smartphones following before the end of the year. 

The SoC race just got a lot hotter, read on to find out what we know about Project Kal-El.

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NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market

Late last year we saw GF110, the first of the revised Fermi family. Utilizing a new low-level transistor design intended to minimize transistor leakage, GF110 brought with it GTX 580 and GTX 570, a pair of powerful if expensive video cards that put NVIDIA back where they traditionally lie on the performance/power curve: very high performance with only moderately high power consumption.

Now with 1 GPU’s revisions under their belts, it’s time for NVIDIA to take to tinkering the next GPU:  GF104. Receiving the same transistor reworking as GF100/GF110 in order to allow NVIDIA to enable all of GF104’s functional units, it has become the aptly named GF114. And it is the heart of NVIDIA’s newest video card: the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Will the GTX 560 Ti follow in the footsteps of its predecessor and shake up the $200 market? Let’s find out.

 

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NVIDIA's Tegra 2 Take Two: More Architectural Details and Design Wins

Twelve months ago NVIDIA stood on stage at CES and introduced its Tegra 2 SoC. It promised dozens of design wins and smartphones shipping before Spring 2010. That obviously did not happen.

What instead happened was NVIDIA lost a number of design wins, many of which we centered around mobile OSes other than Android. There were a number of Windows Mobile/Windows CE based designs that never made it to market, and a lot of efforts around earlier versions of Android that never went anywhere.

In the time since NVIDIA’s CES 2010 announcement, the company has shifted resources and focused its entire Tegra team on a single OS: Android. Choosing Android isn’t a hard decision to understand, of all of the available smartphone OS options it has the most momentum behind it.

Read on for more coverage of NVIDIA's Tegra 2 announcements at CES.

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