Nvidia's GPU Roadmap Slips by One Year Due to Manufacturing Nodes

From X-bit Labs: Back in September, 2010, Nvidia Corp. unveiled its three-years roadmap that disclosed the company's plans to release Kepler family of graphics processing units in 2011 and Maxwell lineup of GPUs in 2013. A lot of happened since then and problems with fabrication processes apparently changed the roadmap of the company. As a result, Kepler family of chips will be relatively small, whereas Maxwell line will emerge only in 2014.

Without any doubts, Kepler architecture is among the most impressive products developed by Nvidia ever. However, at present Nvidia only has two chips - GK104 and GK107 - that utilize Kepler with one more - GK110 - announced for compute applications. Even the first-generation Fermi family featured four graphics chips, with the addition of two additional second-gen Fermi processors, Fermi family included six chips in total. According toVR-Zone web-site, Nvidia will refresh Kepler family no earlier than in March, 2013, in a bid to increase performance of its graphics offerings by 25% - 30%, meanwhile the first Maxwell GPUs are only projected to be unveiled in 2014.

The main reason for the delays is believed to be slow roll-out of new process technologies by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and its rivals.

Nvidia Maxwell will be a very important GPU family for the company. Maxwell will be Nvidia's first graphics processing units to contain project Denver 64-bit ARM-compatible general-purpose core, which means that Maxwell will be able to boot operating systems themselves. Maxwell will be the first top-to-bottom GPU architecture, powering everything from Tegra to Tesla.

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