14 DAY TRIAL // Anyone wondering when Kepler was going to start shipping may have finally gotten their answer, as far as the chips intended for mobile PCs are concerned anyway.
The time of arrival for NVIDIA's next-generation graphics solutions is supposed to be the second quarter of 2012.
That means the April-June period, and while many reports have arisen on the matter, it is generally accepted that the first introductions will be made in April.
That said, April availability demands that the Santa Clara, California-based company start shipping its products to OEMs before that time.
A new report says that this is already happening, at least for the mobile GPUs.
Notebook manufacturers have already begun receiving boxes of Kepler graphics processing units.
Nevertheless, the true, large batch of Kepler GPUs will only be sent out at some point around the middle of February.
The first notebooks that will be made available in April will have the GPUs supplementing Intel's Ivy Bridge series of CPUs (central processing units).
With AMD Radeon HD 7000M GPUs scheduled to appear then as well, everything will lead to offers like Dell's Alienware lineup, which will have both Radeon HD 7970M and GeForce GTX 660M available to choose from.
What most people may not expect is for Kepler to land inside Ultrabooks as well, knowing the need for thinness and, thus, the tendency of these new laptops to make do with the Integrated GPU of the central processor.
Assuming NVIDIA really does score Ultrabook design wins, chances are only entry-level Kepler solutions will be small enough to fit.
On a related note, it is not known whether Advanced Micro Devices has any ultrabook design wins. The likelihood is no, since the Sunnyvale, California hardware maker do not have a technology that does the same thing Optimus accomplishes (keeps the discrete GPU totally turned off unless applications need it).