GeForce 900 series

The GeForce 900 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, used in desktop and laptop PCs. It serves as the high-end introduction for the Maxwell architecture (GM-codenamed chips), named after the Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

The Maxwell microarchitecture, the successor to Kepler microarchitecture, will for the first time feature an integrated ARM CPU of its own. This will make Maxwell GPUs more independent from the main CPU according to Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Nvidia expects three major things from the Maxwell architecture: improved graphics capabilities, simplified programming as well as better energy-efficiency compared to the GeForce 700 Series and GeForce 600 Series

Maxwell was announced in September 2010. The first GeForce consumer-class products based on the Maxwell architecture were released in early 2014. Nvidia is expected to release the Maxwell-powered Tesla accelerator cards as well as Quadro professional graphics cards based on this architecture in late 2014. Eventually, Maxwell architecture will be used for mobile application processors that belong to the Erista family of Tegra SoCs.

GeForce 200 series

The GeForce 200 Series is the 10th generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units, still based on the Tesla (microarchitecture) (GT-codenamed chips), named after the inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla.

Architecture

The GeForce 200 Series introduces Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architecture; the first major update to it since introduced with the GeForce 8 Series.

The GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are based on the same processor core. During the manufacturing process, GTX chips are binned and separated through defect testing of the core's logic functionality. Those that fail to meet the GTX 280 hardware specification are re-tested and binned as GTX 260 (which is specified with fewer stream processors, less ROPs and a narrower memory bus).

In late 2008, Nvidia re-released the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors, up from 192. Effectively, there were two GTX 260 cards in production with non-trivial performance differences.

GeForce 500 series

The GeForce 500 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, based on a refresh of the Fermi (microarchitecture) (GF-codenamed chips) used in the previous 400 series. Nvidia officially announced the GeForce 500 series on 9 November 2010 with the launch of the GeForce GTX 580.

Its direct competitor was AMD's Radeon HD 6000 Series; they were launched approximately a month apart.

Overview

The Nvidia Geforce 500 Series graphics cards are significantly modified versions of the Nvidia GeForce 400 Series graphics cards, in terms of performance and power management. Like the Nvidia GeForce 400 Series graphics cards, the Nvidia Geforce 500 Series graphics cards support DirectX 11.0, OpenGL 4.5, and OpenCL 1.1. This series supports DirectX 12, but cannot support all features of Direct3D 12.

The refreshed Fermi chip is large: it includes 512 stream processors, grouped in 16 stream multiprocessors clusters (each with 32 CUDA cores), and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process.

GeForce 700 series

The GeForce 700 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, used in desktop and laptop PCs. It is mainly based on a refresh of the Kepler microarchitecture (GK-codenamed chips) used in the previous GeForce 600 Series, but also includes cards based on the previous Fermi (GF) and later Maxwell (GM) architectures. A number of GeForce 700 series chips were released for mobile devices in April 2013. GeForce 700 series cards were first released in May 2013, starting with the release of the GeForce GTX Titan on February 19, 2013, and the GeForce GTX 780 on May 23, 2013.

Overview

GK110 has been designed and is being marketed with computational performance in mind. It contains 7.1 billion transistors. This model also attempts to maximise energy efficiency through the execution of as many tasks as possible in parallel according to the capabilities of its streaming processors.

With GK110, increases in memory space and bandwidth for both the register file and the L2 cache over previous models, are seen. At the SMX level, GK110's register file space has increased to 256KB composed of 65K 32bit registers, as compared to Fermi's 33K 32bit registers totaling 128 KB. As for the L2 cache, GK110 L2 cache space increased by up to 1.5MB, 2x as big as GF110. Both the L2 cache and register file bandwidth have also doubled. Performance in register-starved scenarios is also improved as there are more registers available to each thread. This goes in hand with an increase of total number of registers each thread can address, moving from 63 registers per thread to 255 registers per thread with GK110.

Titan (game)

Titan is a fantasy board game for two to six players, designed by Jason B. McAllister and David A. Trampier. It was first published in 1980 by Gorgonstar, a small company created by the designers. Soon afterward, the rights were licensed to Avalon Hill, which made several minor revisions and published the game for many years. Titan went out of print in 1998, when Avalon Hill was sold and ceased operations. A new edition of Titan, with artwork by Kurt Miller and Mike Doyle and produced by Canadian publisher Valley Games became available in late 2008. The Valley Games edition was adapted to the Apple iPad and released on December 21, 2011.

Each player controls an army of mythological creatures such as gargoyles, unicorns, and griffons, led by a single titan. The titan is analogous to the king in chess in that the death of a titan eliminates that player and his entire army from the game. The player controlling the last remaining titan wins the game.

Gameplay

The main game board consists of 96 interlocking hexes, each with a specified terrain type.

Titan (mythology)

In Classical Greek mythology, the Titans (Greek: Τῑτάν Tītán; plural: Τῑτᾶνες Tītânes) and Titanesses (or Titanides) (Greek: Τῑτᾱνίς Tītānís; plural: Τῑτᾱνίδες Tītānídes) were members of the second order of divine beings, descending from the primordial deities and preceding the Olympian deities. Based on Mount Othrys, the Titans most famously included the first twelve children of the primordial Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky). They were giant deities of incredible strength, who ruled during the legendary Golden Age, and also composed the first pantheon of Greek deities.

Among the first generation of twelve Titans, the females were Mnemosyne, Tethys, Theia, Phoebe, Rhea, and Themis and the males were Oceanus, Hyperion, Coeus, Cronus, Crius, and Iapetus.

The second generation of Titans consisted of Hyperion's children Helios, Selene, and Eos; Coeus' children Lelantos, Leto, and Asteria; Iapetus' sons Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Menoetius; Oceanus' daughter Metis; and Crius' sons Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses.

Titan (Bova novel)

Titan is a science fiction novel written by Ben Bova as part of the Grand Tour novel series. It directly follows the novel Saturn, in which the space habitat Goddard has finished its two-year journey from Earth, and has settled into the orbit of Saturn. The book won the 2007 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Plot

The ten thousand civilians of the space habitat Goddard have now finally begun their lives in the Saturn system, after an exhausting two-year journey that almost plunged the infant colony into an authoritative regime. As the probe "Titan Alpha" lands on the moon's surface, a number of strange electrical problems begin happening aboard the space habitat.

Characters