We are still waiting for the first 28nm GPUs that would work very well with the new Sandy Bridge-E. During NVIDIA’s quarterly conference call VP Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that production of Kepler will start “soon” and that several Windows 8 tablets sporting Tegra 3 is in development.
It looks like the first 28nm GPUs are finally coming. NVIDIA VP and founder revealed that production of 28nm GPUs will start soon, and it has a record armount of design wins over last generation graphics cards.
“The vast majority of the [OpEx] increase is coming from the very significant increase in design wins that we have in several areas. We have more notebook design wins for the Ivy Bridge cyle than we ever had in notebooks. And this is likely the most successful notebook cycle we’ve ever experienced. And so we’ve got a lot of engineers dedicated to getting those notebooks into production. The reason for our success, I believe, is because our kepler generation of GPU was designed for intense energy efficiency. And with energy efficiency, we were able to translate that to simultaneously higher performance, as well as longer battery life.”
NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture will be built for energy efficiency and offer three times the DP GFLOPS per watt over the Fermi architecture that is used in the 500 series. It sounds like the priority is with notebooks that will arrive with Ivy Bridge. Considering production soon starts we can expect graphics cards with 28nm GPUs in about three months.
What the company calls its “consumer products” segment, Tegra, is growing like crazy. In just a quarter the revenue of this category is up by 14 percent, which can be compared to professional and retail graphics cards that were up 9.5 and 1 percent respectively.
“The second thing is we have more smart phones in design as a result of Tegra 3. And on top of that, we have Windows 8 tablets and devices that we’re building all over the world. And so those, all of those design wins translate to quite a bit of customer engineering, customer-facing engineering to build these exquisite devices. And then there’s a portion of it that is related to 28-nanometer tape out of new processors that will go into production shortly.”
With the launch of Tegra 3 it will have more design wins for smartphones than ever before, since it has managed to boost performance and reduce energy consumption. There is also tablets in developments at NVIDIA partners for Windows 8, based on Tegra 3. It implies there are 28nm designs for Tegra that will come out soon, which means that Kal-El+ (Tegra 3+) might launch in mid-2012?
Source: Seeking Alpha
