in many cases greatly improves the performance.

We used the GTX 280, GTX 470 and GTX 480 boards. The relevant hardware parameters for these boards are shown in table \[hardware-parameters-table\].

\[hardware-parameters-table\]

  Board Model                         GTX 280     GTX 470     GTX 480
  ------------------------------- ----------- ----------- -----------
  Available                           Q2 2008             
  GPU                                   GT200             
  CUDA capability                         1.3             
  CUDA cores                              240         448         480
  Processor Clock                     1.30GHz     1.22GHz     1.40GHz
  Global Memory                           1GB      1.25GB      1.50GB
  Memory Bandwidth                  141.7GBps   133.9GBps   177.4GBps
  L1 Cache                                N/A             
  L2 Cache                                N/A             
  Max \# of Threads per Block             512             
  Shared Memory per Block                16KB             
  Max \# of Registers per Block         16384             

  : Key features about NVIDIA GTX 280, GTX 470, and GTX 480 graphic cards.

The improvements of the Fermi architecture lies on the new computing capabilities (improved Instruction Set Architecture – ISA), the doubling of cores, the inclusion of L1 and L2 cache, increased per-block amount of parallelism and shared memory.

As every modern computing architecture the memory wall effect has to be relieved with a hierarchy of memories that become faster, more expensive and smaller at the top. The bottom level is the global memory, accessible by every core and having from 1GB to 1.5GB of size[^1] and a latency of 200 cycles. 