14 DAY TRIAL // With its latest Tegra out and about, NVIDIA is now getting ready to release its newest collection of GPUs, the so-called Kepler, which will, apparently, enter mass production shortly.
The Kepler graphics processing units have been spoken of before, but they are only now turning into a physical reality.
They aren't going to start shipping yet, though, since that will only happen next year (2012).
What is, on the other hand, about to happen is the beginning of the mass production stage of these next-generation GPUs.
"There is a portion [of operating expenditures] that is related to 28nm tape-out of new processors that will go into production shortly," said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia.
According to the latest conference call with financial analysts, the Santa Clara, California-based corporation already has a fair number of design wins.
“The vast majority of the increase is coming from the very significant increase in design wins that we have in several areas,” said Mr. Huang.
“We have more notebook design wins for the Ivy Bridge cycle than we ever had in notebooks; this is likely the most successful notebook cycle we have ever experienced. And so we have got a lot of engineers dedicated to getting those notebooks into production.”
Kepler GPU are based on the 28nm manufacturing process and is supposed to make graphics cards not only more powerful, but also more flexible in terms of programmability.
GPGPU (general purpose processing on GPU) application development should accelerate and NVIDIA will also implement virtual memory space (lets CPUs and GPUs to use the "unified" virtual memory), pre-emption and a higher autonomy from the CPU.
"The reason for our [design win] success, I believe, is because our Kepler generation of GPUs was designed for intense energy efficiency. With energy efficiency, we were able to translate that to simultaneously higher performance, as well as longer battery life," explained Mr. Huang.