We have a few details about Nvidia's new plans that we want to share with you. Recent Geforce GTX 470 price drops have alerted many of Nvidia partners who now believe that the new GF104 chip with more firepower is just around the corner.

The new GF104 has eight Streaming multiprocessors (SM) while the old GF104 had seven. This could very easily be the same GF104 chip with one streaming multiprocessor disabled, as Nvidia simply didn’t need that more power back in July time when it launched Geforce GTX 460 cards. Now, since they might need some more power, they simply enabled the eight SM unit.

Each Streaming Multiprocessor(SM) within GF104/106/108 GPU architecture contains 48 SPs and 8 SFUs. The new card could end up with 384 Stream processors and 32 SFUs. So, the Stream processor number is up by 48.

The texture units are likely to get a boost from 56 to 64. All in all it's an eight Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) part that is likely to easily outperform Geforce GTX 470, but bear in mind that GTX 470 at €200 or below is one hot but great buy. And when we say hot, we mean the GTX 470’s 215W TDP hot.

To understand Geforce 400 architecture better, you can read the Wiki part here.