We’ve heard that there is a slight chance that Nvidia will show its new Kepler 28nm architecture at next week’s CES and possibly showcase it at Jen Hsun Huang’s press conference scheduled for January 9th.

This is something that we cannot confirm at press time, but we can confirm that Nvidia partners are pretty concerned about AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 7970 launch. Showing Kepler to the public is a possibility at this point, but at least some partners will see something behind closed doors.

Meanwhile AMD’s 28nm lineup looks very good and despite silent promises made by Nvidia to its partners that “Kepler is much better than that“, they are expressing serious concerns about AMD’s lead, or rather they how to go compete against AMD until Kepler launches. Of course, at this point nobody knows what to expect from Kepler in terms of performance and all we have to go on are Nvidia’s own rosy predictions.

A few partners also confirm that they have heard talk of a Q1 launch for Kepler, but there is no better data than that. A few other independent sources expect to see the cards in Q1 2012 but then to actually start selling the parts in volume in Q2 2012. In any case, AMD will launch much of its 28nm lineup by then and it will open a significant lead with the HD 7970.

We will try to learn more next week at CES, probably some huge announcements on Monday, January 9th 2012 so stay tuned.