Fermi, or GF100 as the chip is also known as is now in production for laptops and will go by the name GeForce GTX 480M. It is Nvidia’s first DirectX 11 GPU with lots of new features including the next-gen CUDA, decentralized hardware tessellation and DirectCompute 5.0.
The mobile version of the GTX 480M (M for Mobile) won’t offer the same performance as the desktop variants, since it’s not allowed to consume even close to that amount of power. It is more reminiscent of Nvidia’s recently launched GTX 465 for desktops. It has three of the original four graphics processing clusters, 11 streaming processors enabled out of the original 16 and 352 CUDA Cores. Furthermore it gets 1GB GDDR5 RAM running on 256-bit bus. The core runs at 425Mhz, shaders at 850MHz and RAM at 600Mhz (2.4 GHz effective).
Nvidia says this is the fastest notebook GPU yet, and it can also be paired up in 2-way SLI. Its main competitor is the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 – AMD/ATI’s top-of-the-line graphics card for laptops, which also has support for DirectX 11 but a 128-bit memory bus and somewhat higher clocks. Comparisons should be interesting once the first GTX 480M laptops are out. The HD 5870 is already on the market in laptops such as the MSI GX740 and Asus G73J.
