NVIDIA introduced its next generation CUDA GPU architecture, codenamed Fermi. An entirely new ground-up design, the Fermi architecture is the foundation for the world’s first computational graphics processing units (GPUs), delivering breakthroughs in both graphics and GPU computing.

"NVIDIA and the Fermi team have taken a giant step towards making GPUs attractive for a broader class of programs,” said Dave Patterson, director Parallel Computing Research Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley and co-author of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. “I believe history will record Fermi as a significant milestone."

As the foundation for NVIDIA’s family of next generation GPUs namely GeForce®, Quadro® and Tesla® − “Fermi” features a host of new technologies that are “must-have” features for the computing space, including:

• C++, complementing existing support for C, Fortran, Java, Python, OpenCL and DirectCompute.
• ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large scale
• 512 CUDA Cores™ featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard, surpassing even the most advanced CPUs
• 8x the peak double precision arithmetic performance over NVIDIA’s last generation GPU. Double precision is critical for high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as linear algebra, numerical simulation, and quantum chemistry
• NVIDIA Parallel DataCache™ - the world’s first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand
• NVIDIA GigaThread™ Engine with support for concurrent kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX® fluid and rigid body solvers)
• Nexus – the world’s first fully integrated heterogeneous computing application development environment within Microsoft Visual Studio