I won’t bother to summarize all the individual features that were revealed today. Tech Report has a excellent article on it, so does AnandTech. I’m just going to editorialize a bit with some of my thoughts based on what we know (and don’t know) so far.

First, boards based on Fermi are going to cost a considerable bit more than the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, which are ATI’s competing DX11 cards that just launched. The RV870 GPU powering ATI’s cards is 334 mm². It has a 256-bit memory interface. Nvidia didn’t talk about GPU size, but it did say that Fermi is 3.0 billion transistors – 40% bigger than RV870’s 2.15 billion. So, figure a chip somewhere around the 460-480 mm² mark. That’s huge.

The chip being 40% bigger doesn’t mean 40% more expensive to produce, though. Imagine chips A and B. Both are 40nm chips made at TSMC. Chip A can fit 100 chips on a wafer, and Chip B can fit 60 chips on a wafer, because it’s 40% bigger. But as chip size grows, it’s harder for the whole chip to come out without flaws, so the yields are worse. Chip A has a yield of 75% – three-fourths of all the chips on the wafer function properly within the intended specs. Chip B has a yield of 60%, because it’s so much larger. That means you’ll get 75 good chips on a wafer for Chip A, but 36 good chips for Chip B. That’s less than half.

In other words, depending on how the yield situation works out, Fermi could be twice as expensive to produce as RV870. Hell, it could be worse. We really have no way of knowing, except to say that a 40% larger chip is usually well more than 40% more expensive to make.

It’s not just the chip, either. A 384-bit memory interface means Fermi-based cards will likely have either 768 MB (not likely) or 1.5 GB of RAM, so that’s higher RAM costs. It also means more PCB layers on the board itself. So aside from higher chip costs, the board costs of Fermi-based products will be higher than Radeon 5800 products.

So if Fermi-based products are going to be considerably more expensive than Radeon 5800 products, what about performance? Well, all Nvidia has talked about so far are the chip design elements that impact GPU compute, rather than traditional graphics. There’s quite a lot there. Nvidia has clearly spent a fair chunk of the transistor budget doing things like dramatically improving double-precision floating point performance, increasing cache sizes, ECC memory support, and so on. These things typically do nothing at all for typical graphics performance (games and stuff). So the chip is 40% more transistors, but that won’t necessarily translate into 40% higher frame rates.

Nvidia seems to be gearing the world up for this. The mantra they keep chanting is that “graphics performance isn’t enough anymore.” Compute really matters a whole heckuva lot, they tell us. This sounds like PR code for “the card is going to be 50% more expensive than the competition and not 50% faster in games, so please place as much importance on GPU compute apps as possible so we look like a better value.”

You know how drill sergeants tell recruits to begin and end everything they say with “sir?” Sir, yes sir! Sir, I didn’t mean to shoot the sergeants toe off, sir! That’s what it’s like listening to Nvidia these days, only with “CUDA” instead of “Sir.” For over a year, Nvidia has told everyone who will listen that GPU compute is super duper important, and has very aggressively flogged PhysX and CUDA. And you know what? Consumers just don’t care all that much. Maybe one day, when there are robust standards and quite a few GPU-accelerated applications that normal people use all the time, the average consumer will want a graphics card to make its non-gaming apps go faster just as much as it wants it to make its games go faster and look better. But we’re not there yet, and we’re not going to be there in the next six months, as much as Nvidia would like us to be.

So Nvidia’s facing a tough sell in Q1 2010 (or maybe late 2009) when the first Fermi-based cards go on sale. They’ll almost certainly cost $399 or more, judging by what we know so far. ATI has a chip and board design that will let them push Radeon HD 5850 cards below $200 and 5870 cards below $250 within the next six months, if they want to. Is a modest increase in frame rate and much higher performance in GPU compute apps going to be worth such a broad difference in price? Will it be a moot point, because the cards will be out of the cost and power budget for most consumers (and OEMs)?

So that’s the latest freelance thing to go up. I do other posts at the Geek Tech blog from time to time, and I’m not going to link all of them here. This one was much larger and more involved than most, so I thought I’d call it out.

There’s only one problem. Drivers.

If you have a notebook with Nvidia graphics, you can probably get drivers directly from Nvidia. There are a few holdout companies, but a great many have agreed. Nvidia had to re-architect their notebook drivers to update the important driver parts but leave the special OEM features/settings alone. They did so, and now you can get drivers for most Nvidia-based notebooks whenever Nvidia updates ‘em, which is often.

My notebook drivers, and this is true of everyone with an ATI-based card in their notebook, has to come from the manufacturer. Dell’s most recent drivers are from February, and there are no Windows 7 drivers at all. What’s the point of ATI releasing monthly drivers if my OEM doesn’t?

If you go to game.amd.com to get the latest graphics drivers, you won’t find any for notebooks. There appear to be graphics drivers at support.amd.com, but don’t be fooled. If you choose Windows XP or Vista (32 or 64-bit) as your OS, you’ll only see drivers listed for the Mobility Radeon 9600 to X1800. Old, old GPUs. Choose Windows 7, which is what I’m running, and there are drivers for the Mobility Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series. Horray!

But wait…those aren’t really the drivers. If you download and install that package, you’ll find that it updates the HDMI drivers and stuff, but not the actual main graphics drivers. And it won’t install Catalyst Control Center.

Enter Mobility Modder.net, an awesome tool from the folks at Driverheaven. The way it works is simple. You go to game.amd.com and download the latest full desktop Catalyst drivers for whichever version of Windows you have, as if your notebook were a desktop system with a desktop graphics card. Then you run the downloaded .exe so that it unpacks everything and starts the installation program – but you don’t actually install the drivers. It won’t work, anyway. You just wanted to unpack them. Then you run Mobility Modder.net (it has some special requirements, like having UAC disabled in Vista, but it’s not hard at all). You point the program to the folder the ATI drivers unpacked themselves to (usually C:\ATI\some other stuff). Then it churns away, modifying the driver installation files to recognize your mobile graphics part.

After it has done it’s thing, just go to C:\ATI\wherever your drivers are and run the setup.exe program. It’ll go through the installer and install the driver and Catalyst Control Center and everything else just as if you had a desktop graphics card. Reboot, and you’re good to go.

I’m especially happy today because, as I said, I have a Dell notebook running Windows 7 with a Mobility Radeon HD 4570 card. Up until yesterday, Mobility Modder.net didn’t support the 4000 series of notebook products. The new 1.2.1.0 update adds this support. I just ran it and it worked like a charm. Drivers installed, CCC works, everything is beautiful.

It’s a real shame ATI notebook users have to go through this nonsense. I know the big OEMs push back against graphics driver updates, but I just don’t get it. I can go to the Synaptic site and download new touchpad drivers, and they’ll install just fine. Same with audio drivers for my notebook. Why the special hate for vendor-supplied graphics drivers, OEMs? Why can’t you add value at no cost to you by letting me make sure I have as few bugs and as high performance as possible?

Until ATI works this out with the OEMs, and they desperately need to do so, Mobility Modder.net continues to save their bacon. If it didn’t exist, I doubt I’d buy a notebook with ATI graphics. I would have thought twice about the Dell I purchased if I realized at the time that Mobility Modder.net didn’t support the 4000 series.

So go forth, fellow ATI-powered notebook owners, and update ye some drivers.