Nvidia's Future GPUs Will Be Kepler, Then Maxwell

News
By Marcus Yam
published

These are the next baby names for GPUs.

(Image credit: Engadget)

Right now, the Fermi technology is the best that Nvidia is shipping. You can expect to see an ever-growing family of Fermi-based GPUs to be joining the latest GTX 480, GTS 460 and 450 models.

What's beyond Fermi? Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang today revealed that it'll be "Kepler".

Kepler will be hitting production later this year, with the first GPU products based on it to be going on sale in 2011. Kepler will be made off the 28nm process, and will be focused far more heavily on performance per watt than Fermi is.

Nvidia estimates that Kepler will be three to four times the performance per watt over Fermi, giving us a ballpark of five gigaflops of per watt.

And after Kepler, reaching into 2013, will be "Maxwell", which should bring 16 times the performance in parallel graphics-based computing, as well as the ability to work independent of a CPU. Performance per watt will triple over the previous generation, hopefully hitting 15 gigaflops per watt.

(Sources: Nvidia Blog, Engadget)

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
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54 Comments Comment from the forums
  • amk09
    Performance/watt improvements sure... but what about price/performance?

    That's what i'm more interested in.
    Reply
  • joytech22
    Even though Nvidia's behind at the moment, at least they know what they're doing.
    Reply
  • liveonc
    amk09Performance/watt improvements sure... but what about price/performance? That's what i'm more interested in.
    price/performance? So you can save $100 & wind up paying $100 a month in electricity on that super gaming rig? What will laptop owners say when their laptop on has 30 minutes of battery life even though it uses a 12 Cell battery?
    Reply
  • tmk221
    28nm process, three to four times the performance per watt over Fermi..
    sounds good to me
    Reply
  • Ehsan w
    looks good :D
    Reply
  • leon2006
    wait until further delays
    Reply
  • scrumworks
    joytech22Even though Nvidia's behind at the moment, at least they know what they're doing.
    They know how to do nice powerpoint presentations.
    Reply
  • ares1214
    This isnt all that impressive for a die shrink. Also even less so considering they had to show it in watts/performance to make fermi look worse, and in relation the others look better. Fermi in 2009...well...
    Reply
  • apache_lives
    no more oven's please
    Reply
  • Cy-Kill
    I remember reading back in 2008, I think, that nVIDIA was going to start using MIMD for their GPUs, what happened to that plan? As they said, it would bring their GPUs to the next level and leave ATi in the dust until ATi would come out with GPUs based on MIMD.
    Reply