Kepler to hit the shops in Q2 of 2012

It has now been all but confirmed that Nvidia’s Kepler 28nm graphics processing chips will start production this year for definite. Its producer TSMC has made plans to start production of the new 28nm architecture but the final end products, graphics cards, will not be hitting the shelves until Q2 2012 at the earliest. Which leaves the Kepler based graphics cards due to arrive at a similar time to Ivy Bridge which is perfect for Intel since Ivy Bridge will support PCI-E 3.0 and the cards are going to be PCI-E 3.0.

In the grand scheme of things this is still quite disappointing for Nvidia, this puts them a quarter behind their long term plan on releasing new GPU architecture (see the roadmap image below). The competition from AMD will also be problematic, AMD expects to be ready to launch by the end of this year with some touting now as early as mid-late September and if the AMD cards are hugely successful we could see Nvidia miss out because of poor timing.

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