14 DAY TRIAL // After a very successful GTX 580 and GTX 570 launch, it seems fairly logical for Nvidia to follow with yet another GTX 500 series graphics card, the GTX 560 being next in line to the throne, the very first details about the GF114 core along with its release date making their way onto the web.
As it's the case with most other leaks, these too arriving from China, via the ChipHell forum, a post detailing the upcoming GTX 560 graphics card.
Compared to the GTX 580 and GTX 570, this will be based on the GF114 core, not so many details about its architecture being known at this time.
Judging by the name, this could come as a hybrid between the GF110 and GF104 architecture, both designs bringing architectural improvements to the original GF100 core that was used for the GTX 480.
However, the shader count seems to disagree with this statement, as the GTX 560 will supposedly sport 384 CUDA cores, which translated to 12 SMs.
The core will be clocked at 875MHz, while the estimated power consumption should be somewhere around the 180W mark.
For comparison, the GTX 570 is provided with 480 CUDA cores, 732MHz graphics core and a 219W TDP, the GTX 560 making up for the three disabled SMs with the improved clock rate, so the GF114 should be pretty close to its older brother in more than a few benchmarks.
Judging by these numbers, it seems fairly likely that the GTX 560 is Nvidia's response to the Radeon HD 6950 as early reports suggest AMD's upcoming card to be in a class of its own as far as the performance/price ratio is concerned.
Fortunately, we won't have to wait that long to see what the GTX 560 is made up of as rumors suggest Nvidia's graphics card will be released on January 20, probably just a few days before the Radeon HD 6990 makes its appearance.