Over at the Nvidia Developer Zone, Mark Harris writes that today the company introduced the new GM204 GPU, based on the second-generation of the Maxwell architecture. And while the device is designed for advanced gaming graphics, it also makes for a great CUDA development platform for HPC.
GM204 is the first GPU based on second-generation Maxwell, the full realization of the Maxwell architecture. The GeForce GTX 980 and 970 GPUs introduced today are the most advanced gaming and graphics GPUs ever made. But of course they also make fantastic CUDA development GPUs, with full support for CUDA 6.5 and all of the latest features of the CUDA platform, including Unified Memory and Dynamic Parallelism. GM204′s 16 SMs make it over 3 times faster than the first-generation GM107 GPU that I introduced earlier this year on Parallel Forall, and additional architectural improvements help GM204 pack an even bigger punch.
Maxwell is the company’s 10th-generation GPU architecture, following Kepler.
The table shows a comparison of speeds and feeds between GeForce GTX 680 (Kepler GK104) and the new GeForce GTX 980 (Maxwell GM204).
| GPU | GeForce GTX 680 (Kepler GK104) | GeForce GTX 980 (Maxwell GM204) |
| CUDA Cores | 1536 | 2048 |
| Base Clock | 1006 MHz | 1126 MHz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1058 MHz | 1216 MHz |
| GFLOPs | 3090 | 4612 |
| Compute Capability | 3.0 | 5.2 |
| SMs | 8 | 16 |
| Shared Memory / SM | 48KB | 96KB |
| Register File Size / SM | 256KB | 256KB |
| Active Blocks / SM | 16 | 32 |
| Texture Units | 128 | 128 |
| Texel fill-rate | 128.8 Gigatexels/s | 144.1 Gigatexels/s |
| Memory | 2048MB | 4096MB |
| Memory Clock | 6008 MHz | 7010 MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 192.3 GB/sec | 224.3 GB/sec |
| ROPs | 32 | 64 |
| L2 Cache Size | 512KB | 2048KB |
| TDP | 195 Watts | 165 Watts |
| Transistors | 3.54 billion | 5.2 billion |
| Die Size | 294 mm² | 398 mm² |
| Manufacturing Process | 28-nm | 28 nm |
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