14 DAY TRIAL // Graphics cards maker Nvidia has announced during a recent press event that by the end of the year the company will start shipping its first GPUs built using the next-generation Kepler architecture manufactured using the 28nm production node.
"Between the Fermi generation and Kepler, which we should start shipping by the end of the year, there is about 3x improvement in [double precision] performance per watt.
“We are about to introduce [our next-generation GPUs]," said Chris Malachowsky, senior vice president of research and co-founder of Nvidia, at the company's GTC Workshop Japan event, reports Xbit Labs.
The Nvidia representative refrained himself from providing any details about the launch date of the first GPUs based on this architecture, but a late Q4 shipping date should mean these will most probably make their appearance at the beginning of 2012.
Another possibility is that Nvidia could go with a 2011 paper launch, while retail availability will be scheduled for Q1 of the following year.
Kepler is the code name used by Nvidia to refer to its next-generation graphics core and, just like AMD's Southern Islands GPUs, this will be manufactured using the 28nm production node.
The new graphics core is also expected to be more flexible in terms of programmability than the current Fermi architecture.
As a result, Nvidia has promised that Kepler, and its successor Maxwell, will include virtual memory space and pre-emption support, and a series of other technologies meant to improve the GPU's ability to process data without the help of the system's processor.
According to previous Nvidia estimates, these changes, combined with the new manufacturing process, should deliver 3 to 4 times the performance per Watt of the Fermi architecture in double-precision 64-bit floating point operations.
In the consumer market, Kepler-based graphics cards will most likely carry the GeForce 600 designation.