14 DAY TRIAL // After late last year Nvidia introduced the GTX 500-series of graphics cards, it now seems like the Santa Clara-based giant is getting ready to launch yet another GPU line, dubbed GTX 600, that will be based on the Kepler core and is built using TSMC's 28 nm manufacturing process.
Announced back in September 2010 during a keynote presentation held by Jen-Hsun Huang, the company's CEO, Kepler is expected to deliver 3 to 4 times better performance per watt than Fermi.
The GPU will be built using TSMC's 28nm manufacturing technology, enabling Nvidia to build a much more cool running and energy efficient core while also keeping the transistor count high.
Just as Fermi, Kepler should also be able to handle complex GPGPU workloads and will feature improved dual precision Gflops performance.
More specific details are not available at this time, but the vga.zol.com.cn website says that Nvidia has surpassed some of the obstacles faced by its new architecture and that, the company, is supposedly getting ready to launch the GTX 600 GPU family (based on Kepler) in Q4 2011.
As before, the new core should make its appearance in high-end desktop cards and then move towards the mainstream and mobile sectors.
AMD's next generation GPUs, code named Southern Islands, will also be manufactured by TSMC using the 28nm manufacturing process, the Radeon HD 7000 graphics card family to be released in Q3 or Q4 2011.
If this report turns out to be true (and I would take it with a huge grain of salt), at the end of the year, AMD and Nvidia will run neck and neck to deliver the fastest graphics card available on the market.
End of it all, let's just hope that TSMC won't face the same manufacturing problems with their 28nm fabrication node as they did when the foundry moved to 40nm.