The approach of NVIDIA's Kepler GPU is something that has been spoken of quite extensively, but the generation may have finally debuted, in sample form, if new rumors are to be trusted.
NVIDIA's Kepler is the next graphics processing unit that NVIDIA plans to unveil and marks the company's advance from the 40nm manufacturing technology to the 28nm node.
The GK100 is the name of the flagship GPU from the new generation and, understandably, it is getting hyped up as these things tend to.
However, it appears that, even though this will be the new big fish, NVIDIA will start, or has started, off, with a smaller one.
Dubbed GX107, it will be utilized in mobile computers and marks, practically, the first time in years that NVIDIA moves to both a new process and a new architecture.
Granted, TSMC canceling the 32nm node probably had something to do with this.
Regardless, the unit, according to
this report, is now sampling and, with luck, production models will be available in the first month of 2012.
Some time ago, NVIDIA officially stated that it had put effort into researching the 28nm technology in great detail, so as to
avoid repeating the mishaps that plagued the 40nm chips.
Unfortunately, with certain other chips,
from AMD, being delayed or in danger of being pushed back, things aren't looking up.
It is, at this point, quite possible that NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices will go through another phase of capricious chip yields, maybe even worse than 40nm proved to be.
On a more positive note, there was some info on the GK107. It will have support for DDR3 and GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit memory interface.
It won't appear too soon in GPUs, as was already stated, but when it does, the chips will probably be branded GeForce GT 600M. The N13E-GE will be the top GX107 product (E stands for enthusiast) and should succeed GTX 560M, though Quadro cards will also appear (based on N14P-Q1 and N14P-Q3).
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