CES 2012: Nvidia Wanted to Showcase Kepler at the Fair, But Decided Not to

With AMD’s release of the 28nm Radeon HD 7970 at the end of last year, everyone’s attention has now turned towards the green camp, but Nvidia’s Kepler still seems to have a long way to go before it arrives, Jen Hsun Huang, the company’s CEO, advising us to be patient about it.

Reportedly, at some point in time Nvidia wanted to present a Kepler GPU at this year’s CES fair during Huang’s keynote speech, but in the end it decided not to.

This was a business decision according to Fudzilla who says that Kepler is actually in production and that the chip is scheduled for a H1 2012 launch, probably at the end of this quarter.

Jen Hsun Huang told the same publication that we need to be patient when it comes to its next-gen GPU, which does indeed seem to imply that we have quite a long wait ahead of us.

Kepler is the code name used by Nvidia to refer to its next-generation graphics processing unit architecture, which, just like AMD's Radeon HD 7900 GPUs, is manufactured using TSMC's high-K metal gate (HKMG) 28nm fabrication process.

The new graphics core is expected to be more flexible in terms of programmability than the current Fermi architecture.

In the second half of 2010, Nvidia promised that Kepler, and its successor Maxwell, will include virtual memory space (allowing both the CPU and the GPU to use a unified virtual memory) and pre-emption support, as well as 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.

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