NVIDIA has recently detailed its plans regarding the launch of the next-generation Kepler GPU architecture, letting us know that the first products based on these designs won’t actually arrive into the retail channel until 2012.

According to an NVIDIA representative, the company is scheduled to receive early silicon by the end of this year, but the cards won’t go into production until 2012.

“Although we will have early silicon this year, Kepler-based products are actually scheduled to go into production in 2012. We wanted to clarify this so people wouldn’t expect product to be available this year,” said Ken Brown, a spokesman for NVIDIA, in an email statement sent to Xbit Labs.

Earlier this week, Chris Malachowsky, senior vice president of research and a co-founder of NVIDIA, said that the first Kepler graphics cards will start shipping by the end of this year.

Kepler is the code name used by NVIDIA to refer to its next-generation graphics processing unit architecture, which, just like AMD’s Southern Islands GPUs, will be manufactured using TSMC’s 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 CPU 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.

In the consumer market, Kepler-based graphics cards will most likely carry the GeForce 600 designation.
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