NVIDIA this evening provided an early look at the next generation of its graphics processors. Nicknamed Fermi, the architecture for future GeForce, Quadro and Tesla chipsets will jump from 240 cores to a much larger 512 and should be much faster in each core courtesy of some industry-first techniques. Fermi chips will be the first GPUs to have a real cache hierarchy, with Level 1 caches to keep specific information on hand and a single, shared Level 2 cache for larger tasks; they will also have a new GigaThread engine that can transfer data
