14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the successful launch of the Radeon HD 7970, Nvidia isn’t impressed with the performance of AMD’s new graphics card and believes that Kepler will have no problems in becoming the fastest GPU around, once it’s officially launched.
"Honestly, we expected more from our competitor’s new architecture," said a high ranking Nvidia official during a meeting with Nordic Hardware.
The official also revealed that before the launch of the Radeon HD 7970, its company came up with a series of performance estimates for the HD 7900 series that they were preparing to beat with Kepler.
However, the Radeon HD 7970 performance came under these initial estimates, so Nvidia is now confident that its upcoming GPUs won’t have any problems in surpassing the HD 7900 series.
Although Nvidia seems quite confident in Kepler, the company still hasn’t established a launch schedule for its 28nm GPU, a company spokesperson revealing only that Kepler will arrive in the “first half of 2012.”
The same Nvidia representative hinted that the new architecture could launch by the end of March, although a Q2 release could also be a possibility.
Little else is known about Kepler at this point in time, but just like AMD has done with the Radeon HD 7900 series, Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs will be manufactured using TSMC's high-K metal gate (HKMG) 28nm fabrication process.
Compared to Fermi, Nvidia’s upcoming graphics core is expected to be more flexible in terms of programmability and is expected to deliver 3 to 4 times the performance per Watt of the GF100 architecture, in double-precision 64-bit floating-point operations.
Whether this will be enough to take down the Radeon HD 7970 in terms of performance it remains to be seen, but Nvidia sure seems to have a lot of confidence in its next-gen 28nm GPUs.