Amid the lack of any official and revealing information about its next-generation flagship GeForce “Fermi” GF100 graphics card for desktops, Nvidia Corp. continues to publish static pictures of the novelty in order to attract attention to its future product.

On Tuesday Nvidia revealed a photo of Tom Petersen, director of technical marketing at Nvidia, proudly showing off his new Maingear Shift PC, equipped with two GeForce “Fermi” GF100 graphics cards. Based on the picture, it can be said that the new graphics accelerator from Nvidia can, at least, enable multi-GPU SLI mode and can operate inside custom PC from a boutique vendor.

Nvidia demonstrated its code-named GF100 (also known as NV60, G300, GT300, etc) graphics processor based on code-named Fermi architecture in late September, days after arch-rival ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, started to sell its Radeon 5800-series graphics cards, the first DirectX 11-supporting solutions on the planet. However, since then the company remained relatively quiet about its next-generation GeForce. The only official comment on the matter was made by the company’s chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, who said that production of the GF100 would be ramped only in Q1 FY2011. Nvidia’s first quarter of fiscal year 2011 begins on the 26th of January and ends on the 26th of April, 2010.

Due to lack of official information about the progress of already revealed technology, publication of photographs may be considered as an indirect progress report. In mid-November Nvidia revealed that the GeForce “Fermi” GF100 can render DirectX 11 benchmark and today the firm disclosed that the product now supports SLI multi-GPU technology.

The flagship Fermi graphics processor will feature 512 stream processing engines (which are organized as 16 streaming multi-processors with 32 cores in each) that support a type of multi-threading technology to maximize utilization of cores. Each stream processor has a fully pipelined integer arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and floating point unit (FPU). The top-of-the-range chip contains 3 billion of transistors, features 384-bit memory GDDR5 memory controller with ECC and features rather unprecedented 768KB unified level-two cache as well as rather complex cache hierarchy in general. Naturally, the Fermi family is compatible with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.x and OpenCL 1.x application programming interfaces (APIs). The new chips will be made using 40nm process technology at TSMC.

Tags: Nvidia, Fermi, GF100, GT300, NV60, Geforce, 40nm