Word on the street is that NVIDIA has a new GPU in the works and it is massive. Supposedly, the new GPU will boast a mind-boggling 1.8 billion transistors and will have a shader count in the region of 384. Believed to be codenamed "GT212", the new GPU will now also have access to super-fast GDDR5 memory.

Nordic Hardware - NVIDIA GT212 is rumored to be the next high-end chip from NVIDIA. Most seem to indicate that this chip will be made with the TSMC 40nm manufacturing process, but the exact specifications have remained clouded. According to a source to hardware-infos, the chip will trump the 1.4 billion transistors of GT200 with another 400 million adding up to 1.8 billion all in all. They also claim that the number of shaders will be upgraded to 384 by adding to extra clusters of shaders and upgrading each cluster from 24 to 32 shaders.

http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=12412&cid=6

Thats about 3* the number of transistors in the PS3 FYI

Considering the logic/cache ratio is even better in GPUs than the mighty Cell, thats quite a lot of performance. Wait I think I need to make the comment that its probably more useful for researchers at this point than gamers!

So what? It's a straight shrink from 55nm to 40nm - so you would expect double the transistors at the same die size. They're not quite doubling the transistors, so the die size falls.

AMD will have their 40nm chips out first - again, a straight shrink of RV770. 55nm RV770 is about even with 55nm GT200, so you would expect the same at 40nm.

The real battle is the last half of the year - AMD look like they will release R8xx in Q3 while GT300 is rumoured as Q4, so it'll depend on the strength of the new architectures. But it's not like Nvidia is in a special postion - this is catch-up from AMD having high-end 55nm well over a year before Nvidia did.

How many cores does the GPU have?

GPUs don't really work on "cores", but it has 384 shader units arranged in 32 clusters. The ROP and TMU count hasn't increased, however, so performance should be about 1.5x the performance of a current GTX280 or HD4870.