Nvidia 28nm Kepler GPUs Will Arrive in April, Says Report

The launch date of Nvidia’s next-gen 28nm Kepler GPUs has remained a mystery for quite some time now, but a recent report has come to unveil that the company’s GeForce 600-series graphics cards will be released in April this year.

The article, published earlier by DigiTimes, says that in an unprecedented move, Nvidia plans to launch all of its eight Kepler graphics card models in April 2012.

However, according to VR-Zone, this scenario wouldn’t make much sense for the Santa Clara-based chip maker. More likely, Nvidia’s April Kepler release will only include the GK104 GPU, which will be used for the GeForce GTX 660 series graphics cards.

As we have reported earlier this week, the GK104 core will be available in two versions, dubbed GK104-400 and GK104-335.

Both of these will actually be based on the same GPU, but the former comes as a fully working GK104 part, while the latter is a partially fused off version of the same chip.

The main difference between the two cores lies in the number of graphics processing clusters they will include, since the -400 is said to be an “8 group” device compared to the -335, which is described as a “7 group” GPU.

Nvidia has designed Kepler to be more flexible in terms of programmability than the current Fermi architecture and this is the company’s first GPU to be based on TSMC's high-K metal gate (HKMG) 28nm fabrication process (the same one used by AMD for the Radeon HD 7900 series cards).

According to a previous report, Nvidia has already started sampling the GK104 to its AIB partners, which should mean that its first GTX 660 graphics cards should be ready in 4 to 6 weeks’ time.