NVIDIA GeForce 600 Laptop GPUs Come in December, 2011

NVIDIA will either release a new set of GPUs next month or, more likely, rebrand existing ones as GeForce 610M, GeForce GT 630M and GeForce GT 635M.

It is reported that NVIDIA will release some new mobile graphics processing units on December 6, 2011.

Whether or not they will be totally new SKUs or rebrands is unclear at this point, but some seem to be leaning more towards the latter.

There is also the very, very slim possibility that they are based on the next-generation Kepler architecture.

The other, bigger likelihood is that they are all still Fermi chips at heart, though perhaps from the rumored 28nm shrinks.

Right now, GK107 is known (more or less) to be on the way as the first Kepler, set for 2012 (also from 600 series).

Regardless of their nature, though, the GeForce 610M, GeForce GT 630M and GeForce GT 635M will be available to laptop developers in little under a month.

In other words, laptops powered by them probably won't hit shelves during the holiday season.

It shouldn't take longer than the first quarter of 2012 for notebooks to arrive though.

GT 630M will have, among other variants, 144 CUDA cores and a memory interface of 128 bits, just like the GeForce GT 555M.

Meanwhile, the GT635M will show up in multiple versions as well, probably still a GT 555M rebrand at heart.

Furthermore, the GT 610M, though not a rebrand of 555M, will likely be a renamed GT 520, with 48 cores and 64-bit memory (again, more variants will exist, codenamed N13M-GE1/3/5).

The whole naming scheme might actually turn out to be somewhat confusing given all the different models of each base GPU.

NVIDIA naturally wants to make sure that it doesn't fall behind on the GPU front, especially since it would be awkward for Tegra, with Kal-El now out, to be successful and for its GPU business to underwhelm.