T
he hardware design group at NVIDIA’s Bangalore facility has spent most part of the last 2 years huddled over design plans, and actual silicon. They have worked hard on a completely new platform for Intel’s latest set of processors and several that will be coming up shortly.
What has come out of the endless nights of research and optimization is nForce 6—the latest motherboard platform from the nForce series. What’s more, the entire chip has been developed and conceptualized right out of Bangalore. This is the first time that a chip has been entirely conceptualized and designed in India.
The road to achieving this was not easy, however.
As Sunil Nanda, Senior Director, NVIDIA India explains, “The challenge of getting the best performance out of the platform as well as the processor was addressed on multiple fronts.”
The first thing that was needed was a new micro architecture. With the increasing sizes of on-chip caches on CPUs, there are very few cycles visible on the FSB. NVIDIA designers did a lot of trace collection, analyses and modeling
to arrive at a micro-architecture, which delivers a stunning performance.
Secondly, the circuit design was a big challenge. Designers had to push the envelope here to obtain stability across the widest range of FSB and DDR2 memory speeds. In fact, NVIDIA invented a number of unique circuits to ensure that the eye-openings on the timing waveforms were wide and stable. In addition, some techniques were developed to ensure that the synchronizing penalties across clock domain crossings were minimal.
Finally, it was necessary to ensure that the nForce 680i is the most overclockable Intel platform ever built. This had implications on both the chip design as well as the motherboard design.
On the chip design front, the timing targets had to be much better than what the “stock” specifications require. The board was designed from the ground up to deliver performance above the rated specs straight out of the box. Given that the rated specs themselves were for the fastest Intel platform, substantially exceeding those by design was indeed a challenge.
Due to the approach of “designed for better than spec performance” NVIDIA ensured that every nForce 680i motherboard is the most overclockable motherboard designed to date.
Author information
You can reach Varun Dubey at vdubey@nvidia.com
blurb: This is the first time that a chip has been entirely con-ceptualized and designed in India.
caption: The 680i, is the most overclockable motherboard designed to date.
NVIDIA’s designers developed a completely new platform for Intel’s latest set of processors.
