14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Nvidia hasn’t officially announced its 600-series of mobile GPUs based on the Kepler architecture, the first benchmarks of such a graphics core, the GeForce GT 640M, have already made their appearance on the web.
This 28nm GPU was used by Acer in its recently announced Aspire TimelineU M3 Ultrabook, which was reviewed by AnandTech just a few hours ago.
According to the specifications accompanying Acer’s notebook, the GT 640M graphics core runs at speeds up to 625MHz and includes no less than 384 CUDA cores.
This is four times the number of shaders packed by its predecessors, the GT 540, if we are to believe what Acer tells us.
In the TimelineU M3 Ultrabook , the GT 640 graphics core is linked via a 128-bit wide bus to 1GB of DDR3 memory that works at 900MHz (1.8GHz data rate), but Nvidia also allows for this GPU to be paired with faster GDDR5 VRAM.
Besides the Nvidia Kepler graphics card, Acer’s ultra-thin notebook also includes an Intel Core i7-2637M dual-core CPU with a base frequency of 1.7GHz and 2.8GHz maximum Turbo, as well as 4GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory.
The Ultrabook was put through various benchmarks, including Battlefield 3, Skyrim or Dirt 3, to test its gaming performance.
These have revealed that the GeForce GT 640M is a significant upgrade when compared with the GT 540M it replaces, as it manages to deliver playable frame rates in all of the games tested at the notebook’s default 1366x768 resolution.
So far, we don’t know when Nvidia plans to officially announce its new 600-series mobile GPUs based on the Kepler architecture.
The first desktop part based on this design, the GeForce GTX 680, is rumored to be launched on March 23.
