14 DAY TRIAL // Riding on the wave of positive reviews of its new Kepler architecture, NVIDIA is introducing their new mobile line of GPUs with big hopes for high sales. Using the new energy efficient architecture in the mobile world is something we've all been waiting for.
But not all is rosy with the new line of products. Sure, NVIDIA was touting over 300 design wins with their new Kepler architecture, but these new products that have just been announced have very little in common with the Kepler design.
The top part is called GeForce GTX 675M and it is a Fermi-based GPU. Practically, this is a renamed 580M with the same GPU frequency of 620MHz, 384 Shader Cores with a Texture Fill Rate of 39.7 Billion per second.
It has a 96 GB/s bandwidth using the same 256 Bit wide BUS with GDDR5 memory clocked at 1500 MHz. This is around half of what the current desktop Kepler is able to offer. The GTX 680 sits on top at 192.26 GB/s memory bandwidth.
There are still some more rumored Kepler parts coming. While the GTX 670 and the GTX 675 are Fermi based, the lower performing GT 660M, 650M and the 640M are also said to be Kepler family members.
On the low end, the GT 635M, GT 630M and the GT 620M are Fermi parts along with their youngest brother, the GeForce 610M that were probably renamed to be ready for marketing alongside with the new Ivy Bridge-based laptops.
It’s disappointing that the energy efficient architecture of Kepler is still some months away from the new generation of notebooks and the hot Fermi-based GPUs are in contrast with the cool, high performance of the Ivy Bridge mobile CPUs.
For those in the market for some new Ivy Bridge Easter surprise, you should do some research before buying anything just to make sure all the “eggs” in your new notebook are fresh Kepler ones and not from last Easter.