There has been a lot of talk about AMD being the first to market with a 28nm GPU since NVIDIA has not intended to release Kepler until 2012. During an event in Japan NVIDIA has on the contrary promised to start shipping Kepler before the end of the year. Beside higher game performance it promises three times higher performance per watt.
It has been quiet on the NVIDIA front, who has been reluctant to discuss Kepler, but it now spills the beans and says that it will ship the new architecture before the end of the year.
“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],” Chris Malachowsky en av NVIDIA:s grundare.
The only thing we really know about Kepler is that it will use 28nm at TSMC and according to NVIDIA offering three times higher Double Precision-prestanda per watt over Fermi, something that sounds very good since Fermi was a good performer from a performance/watt perspective in GPGPU applications.
What it means that Kepler will be shipping before the end of the year is a bit unclear, it might as well mean we are about to see a paper launch where only key partners will get access to the card, or best case a fullscale launch. AMD has many tomes implied that its first 28nm GPU of Northern Islands will ship this year and earlier than expected, but it definitiley doesn’t look like NVIDIA is going to give them anything for free.
Source: Xbitlabs
