Jul 4, 2011 19:31 GMT  ·  By

Expected by many computer enthusiasts and gamers out there, Nvidia's next-generation graphics core that goes by the name of Kepler won't reach retail until the first quarter of 2012 as TSMC is having troubles with the maturity of its 28nm fabrication process.

According to sources cited by Fudzilla, the first Kepler chips could theoretically be ready for a Q4 2011 release, but the company believes that such a launch doesn't make much sense as it will come too late in the fourth quarter.

As a result, Nvidia has decided to release the first Kepler-based graphics cards in early 2012, but a firm date hasn't been established at this time.

Kepler is the name used by Nvidia for its next-generation graphics core and, just like AMD's Southern Islands GPUs, is a 28nm die shrink of the current Fermi architecture with a few minor tweaks and improvements meant to increase the performance of the chip.

According to the Santa Clara company, these changes, combined with the new manufacturing process, should deliver 3 to 4 times the performance per Watt of the Fermi core in double-precision 64-bit floating point operations.

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.

Even though Kepler was pushed back to Q1 2012, AMD is still on schedule to launch its 28nm chip in 2011, some rumors even claiming that the first Southern Islands GPUs will be released in September.

Furthermore, the code names of the upcoming Radeon HD 7000 GPUs were just recently confirmed by a preliminary version of the Catalyst 11.7 driver, which seems to suggest that we aren't that far away from the launch of the first AMD Southern Islands GPUs.