It is clear that the Fermi architecture was developed in order to offer double-precision elaboration capabilities, useful for some GPU computing processes, and its efficiency is much higher than what was supplied with the GT200. Not only the number of stream processors is almost doubled, but there’s also a reduced penalty in elaborating FP64 instructions. The G80, the first nVIDIA GPU for DirectX 10, for example, lacked FP64 support completely.

For each streaming microprocessor, there’s a dedicated 64Kbytes cache which can be used as shared memory and L1 cached: the ratios are 1:3 or 3:1. The ratio is dependable on the application that is being run. The GT200, for example, integrated a 16Kbytes memory that wasn’t partitionable.