14 DAY TRIAL // Designed to offer a staggering boost in graphics performance, Nvidia's Kepler architecture, that is the successor of the current GF1xx Fermi GPUs, has already been taped out, according to a report that was just posted online.
This report comes from the Fudzilla publication, so you must take it with a grain of salt, and it cites a number of sources familiar with Nvidia's efforts.
In electronics design, the “tape out” term is used to describe the final result of the design cycle of a chip and means that the integrated circuit can be sent to the foundry for manufacturing the first physical samples.
These will then go through a number of spins as the design is further refined to eliminate any potential flaws that made their way into the integrated circuit.
According to the same source, up to this point Kepler looks fairly well and the most important obstacles that Nvidia has to overcome have to do with leakage, as the new chip still has to be fine tuned for the 28nm fabrication node.
This process is expected to take quite a bit of time, and the most optimistic estimates place the retail availability of the first Kepler-based GPUs in the fourth quarter of 2011, although a more realistic launch date is Q1 2012.
Sadly, this is all the information that is available for now regarding Kepler, as Nvidia is pretty tight-lipped when it comes to detailing its upcoming GPU family.
From the data that is available until now, we do however know that Kepler is expected to deliver an estimated 3 to 4 times the performance per watt offered by Fermi.
Meanwhile, the latest rumors to make their appearance suggest that AMD's first Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards, based on the Southern Islands architecture, will arrive in September of 2011.