Nvidia Kepler GK104 GPU Is Reportedly Smaller Than the HD 7970

Rumors regarding Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards, code named Kepler, keep on arriving at a frantic pace, the latest of these claiming that the mid-range GK104 GPU has a smaller die than that of AMD Tahiti graphics cores.

According to SemiAccurate, some unnamed sources have managed to measure Nvidia’s GPU and after some calculation they found out that the GK104 die has between 324 and 361 square millimeters.

While this is a lot bigger than what most of us were expecting, the chip is actually smaller than the Tahiti GPUs used by AMD in the Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950, which measure 365mm2.

No specifications were provided together with these measurements, but a previous report that arrived just yesterday indicated that the GPU included 512 stream processors, along with 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus.

This is said to link the GPU to a maximum of 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM working at data rate speeds of up to 5.8GHz.

According to the same article, which also provided the specifications of the GK104 core, Nvidia will use this GPU for both the GeForce GTX 660 and the GTX 650 Ti, the former being expected to arrive in April 2012.

The GTX 650 Ti on the other seems to be scheduled for a Q3 release and is said to carry a $249 (190 EUR) price tag, while its older brother will sell for $70 (53 EUR) more.

Just like AMD has done for the Radeon HD 7900-series, Nvidia’s Kepler GPUs will also be manufactured using TSMC's high-K metal gate (HKMG) 28nm fabrication process. The new graphics core is expected to be more flexible in terms of programmability than the current Fermi architecture.