Nvidia CEO Hints at Kepler For Tegra Phones, Data Centers

Nvidia has sparked some rumors that Kepler will be making its way into a future version of Tegra, possibly Tegra 4.

An email sent by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, states that the "super-efficient" architecture will become available for GPUs that are used in "data centers", "super-thin notebooks" and "superphones".

Tegra 4 is currently scheduled to be released in the first quarter of next year. Rumors suggest that Nvidia could be building on its 4+1 core strategy with Cortex-A15 ARM cores that are built on a 28 nm process. Nvidia previously stated the successor of Tegra 3 could be up to ten times faster than Tegra 2 and up to five times faster than Tegra 3. The performance jump will be necessary to allow Nvidia compete with the upcoming Samsung Exynos processors and Qualcomm's Krait architecture - and fend off performance claims made by Apple.

An interesting question will be how many graphics cores Tegra 4 will be able to integrate. Would 64 cores be realistic?