Elite Bastards has posted a brief performance preview of Foxconn's GeForce 8800 GTX
We may as well kick things off with a simple fact - The G80 core which powers the GeForce 8800 is huge. Built on TSMC's 90 nanometre process, G80 consists of a whopping 681 million transistors, substantially more than even Intel's recently released Core 2 Quad CPUs. Of course, this kind of transistor count on what is now a pretty mature manufacturing process means a big (and thus expensive) die underneath the heatspreader which houses the core and helps to output heat from the GPU to its hefty cooling system.NVIDIA G80 - Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX Review
The sheer size and complexity of G80 probably goes a long way to explaining the inclusion of a separate daughter die on GeForce 8800 boards, dubbed NVIO. As the name might suggest, this die handles input and output for the graphics board, which covers everything from inter-GPU communication via the normal SLI connectors used by NVIDIA to any and all display output and input from the board. Naturally this includes both TV out and video-in, as well as the two HDCP capable dual-link DVI connectors found as standard on all GeForce 8800 boards.
