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Graphics
Kepler in production soon
Jensen confirms
Jensen Huang, the fearsome leader of Nvidia, doesn’t talk about the unreleased products, but he has decided to share with investors that Kepler, Nvidia’s new 28nm GPU will go into production soon.
He didn’t said when will we see it available as notebook, desktop, professional or computational part, but he mentioned that it should be more power aware than Fermi chips, which really isn’t setting the bar very high. This will make it a good match for all growing notebook market segment and Optimus platform, but we believe that Nvidia is doing everything that is in its power to beat the Southern Islands of AMD.
Still, we don’t expect to see Kepler this year as 28nm production is not that mature, and these chips are complex. However, at the same time we believe that, at least for the notebook product line, Nvidia plans to launch it around Ivy Bridge launch, that is expected in March or April 2012. Let’s not forget that Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini said that Ivy Bridge 22nm processors are already in production, but from all that we know, the official launch and availability is early next year. The latest documents we’ve seen point at a launch in March or April.
With AMD set to launch Radeon HD 7970 and 7950 cards codenamed Tahiti XP and Tahiti Pro in January 2012, we don’t think Nvidia will come much later. Still, serious quantities of any 28nm graphics can only be expected later in 2012 but we would not completely eliminate to possibility of a PR launch of limitedly available next generation 28nm graphics cards from both camps.