NVIDIA’s Fermi GPU makes an 8x performance improvement in double precision compared to current GPUs. It also includes 512 CUDA cores, as compared to the Tesla’s 240.

Fermi

There are a lot of features targeted for high-performance computing in Fermi. Ars Technica writes about Fermi:

For the first time, the GPU gets support for advanced control flow mechanisms like indirect branches and fine-grained exception handling—neither of these features are particularly important for the immediate or near-term gaming market, but they’ll greatly enhance Fermi’s attractiveness as an HPC coprocessor.

Software will be very important in NVIDIA’s efforts:

NVIDIA will combine Fermi’s new level of GPU programmability with a full complement of software support for everything from DirectX and DirectCompute to OpenCL, C++, and Fortran. NVIDIA is also placing a heavy emphasis on development tools and developer support, and in doing so it acknowledges that competing in the many-core market is just as much a software battle as it is a hardware battle.

Last year, we were able to get our hands on a Tesla supercomputer, I am hoping to see Fermi in action.