NVIDIA CEO: GF100 in volume production

During NVIDIA's CES Press Conference a few days ago, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that their next-generation GF100 Fermi GPU is in volume production now, although he wouldn't provide an exact release date.

Huang also confirmed that GF100 would support NVIDIA's upcoming 3D Vision Surround, which provides 3D Vision support across multiple displays in a similar fashion to ATI's Eyefinity tech. FYI, the GF100 is about 10.5 inches long, takes up two PCI slots, has a cooling system with one fan, and requires extra power via two PCIe power connectors (one 6-pin and an 8-pin). Nvidia's card has support for SLI (3-way SLI), DirectX 11, OpenCL, PhysX, CUDA, and should boast a 384-bit memory interface as well as 512 CUDA cores.

The highlight of the press conference though was Tegra 2. The chip features a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU at speeds up to 1GHz. NVIDIA says its up to 4 times faster than their first-generation Tegra chip, with 8 independent processors used to handle web browsing, HD video encode and decode, and 3D gaming. With regards to that last part, Epic's Tim Sweeney was also on-hand to demonstrate Unreal Engine 3 running on Tegra 2. When Huang asked him which desktop GeForce product their latest Tegra offering compared too, Sweeney responded by saying it's about as powerful as high-end desktop GPUs from 3-4 years ago. Tegra chips were also showcased in a variety of tablet PCs, as well as Audi's upcoming A8 luxury sedan.

You can check out the press-conference in HD right here.