Public domain ↗
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
- Year
- 2006
- Creator
- NVIDIA (Jensen Huang, CEO)
- Company
- NVIDIA
- Location
- Santa Clara, California
- Room
- The Rebuild ↗
Description
The GeForce 8800 GTX is a graphics card that NVIDIA released on November 8, 2006, for $599. Its G80 chip has 128 identical stream processors, and it was the first NVIDIA chip to support CUDA.
Importance
The GeForce 7900 and earlier NVIDIA chips had separate units for vertex and pixel work, but the G80 used unified processors for all shading. CUDA let programmers use these processors for general calculations. In 2012, the AlexNet team trained its neural network with CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs, and machine learning later became a main market for NVIDIA.
Interesting fact
The G80 chip held 681 million transistors, and NVIDIA put the display circuits on a second, smaller chip on the board.
Sources
- NVIDIA Unveils CUDA - The GPU Computing Revolution Begins (press release) ↗NVIDIA via HEXUS · 2006-11-08
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX Review - DX10 and Unified Architecture ↗PC Perspective · 2006-11-08
- Nvidia Part II: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) ↗Acquired (podcast) · 2022
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX Review: The G80 Architecture ↗PC Perspective · 2006-11-08