NVIDIA's D9M makes its first appearance on corporate roadmaps
NVIDIA's newest mid-range processor, codenamed D9M, will make its official debut as the GeForce 9600 GT.
Corporate guidance from NVIDIA lists the initial GeForce 9600 GT shipments come stock with a 650 MHz core clock and a 1625 MHz unified shader clock. Unlike the G84 core found on GeForce 8600 GT, D9M will feature a 256-bit memory bus interface. Coupled with a 900 MHz memory clock, NVIDIA calculates the memory bandwidth at 57.6 GB/s.
The texture fill rate is estimated at 20.8 billion pixels per second. The company would not indicate how many shaders or stream processors reside on the D9M core.
Late last year, NVIDIA confirmed the D9 family will use TSMC's 65nm process node. The company introduced its first 65nm processor shrink in November 2007: the G92.
Other details of the D9M family have already surfaced. ChileHardware published slides yesterday claiming the GeForce 9600 requires a 400W power supply that requires 26A on the 12V rail. Unlike previous mid-range GeForce cards, the D9M will require a 6-pin supplementary power connector.
NVIDIA publicly confirmed other details of D9M: DirectX 10.1 support, Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.1 and PCIe 2.0 support just to name a few.
Further documentation from NVIDIA claims the 9600 GT will also support the Quantum Effects physics processing engine.
Like all NVIDIA processors, the GeForce 9600 is also HDCP compatible, though final support still depends on vendor implementation.
NVIDIA declined to comment on expected price of GeForce 9600. A representative for NVIDIA would comment that the performance increase between GeForce 9600 and GeForce 8600 is "almost double."
