The GF100, the first Fermi-architecture product, is large: 512 stream processors, in sixteen groups of 32, and 3.0 billion transistors, manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process.

The chips found in the high performance Tesla branding feature memory with optional ECC and the ability to perform one double-precision floating-point operation per cycle per core; the consumer GeForce cards are artificially driver restricted to one DP operation per four cycles.

With these features, combined with support for Visual Studio and C++, Nvidia targeted professional and commercial markets, as well as use in high performance computing.

Parameters such as the number of registers can be found in the CUDA Compute Capability Comparison Table in the reference manual.

[3] On September 30, 2009, Nvidia released a white paper describing the architecture:[4] the chip features 16 'Streaming Multiprocessors' each with 32 'CUDA Cores' capable of one single-precision operation per cycle or one double-precision operation every other cycle, a 40-bit virtual address space which allows the host's memory to be mapped into the chip's address space, meaning that there is only one kind of pointer and making C++ support significantly easier, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

Many users reported high temperatures and power consumption while receiving correspondingly poor performance improves in the GeForce 400 series Fermi GPUs when compared to rival competitor AMD's Radeon HD 5000 series - leading AMD to create and release a promotional video "The Misunderstanding"[5] to poke fun at the issue.

In the video, a police unit is seen commencing a raid on a house with a large thermal profile, indicating a grow operation.

[14] Nvidia announced in April 2018 that Fermi will move to legacy driver support status and be maintained until January 2019.