After AMD’s recent release of its Radeon HD 7970 GPU, Nvidia is now also said to have plans to introduce a series of 28nm GPUs of their own, dubbed the GK106 and GK107, which according to some sources should arrive by the end of this month.
Unlike AMD’s Tahiti XT graphics core, the two GPUs that
CPU-World says
Nvidia plans to launch this month target the entry-level market and are destined to be used inside notebooks and other similar mobile devices.
Little is known at this point about the specs of these two graphics processors, but some leaked info published at the end of last year by
4Gamer suggested that both of these GPUs will pack support for DirectX 11.1.
This will be one of the few similarities between the GK106 and GK107 as the former comes with a 256-bit wide memory bus and PCI Express 3.0 support, while the GK107 is limited at PCIe 2.0 and has a 128-bit memory bus.
Kepler is the code name used by Nvidia to refer to its next-generation graphics processing unit architecture, which, just like AMD's
Radeon HD 7000 GPUs, will be manufactured using TSMC's 28nm fabrication process.
The new graphics core is expected to be more flexible in terms of programmability than the current Fermi architecture.
In the second half of 2010, Nvidia promised that Kepler, and its successor Maxwell, will include virtual memory space (allowing both the CPU and the
GPU to use a unified virtual memory) and pre-emption support, as well as a series of other technologies meant to improve the GPU's ability to process data without the help of the system's processor.
According to previous Nvidia estimates, these changes, combined with the new manufacturing process, should deliver 3 to 4 times the performance per Watt of the Fermi architecture in double-precision 64-bit floating point operations.
Find us on Google+
