Kepler and Maxwell on the Roadmap for NVIDIA

摘要

On Sept. 21, NVIDIA's cofounder, president and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, took the stage at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2010, San Jose Convention Center, CA), donning his trademark black T-shirt. The company's current GPU architecture, dubbed Fermi, represented a technological leap, he reminded us: "Fermi is six times faster than the previous generation." Packing as many as 896 cores on a single board (Quadro Plex 7000), it could justifiably be considered a supercomputer on a chip. Under Fermi, NVIDIA GPU performance reached 1.5 double-precision gigaflops (DP GFLOPS) per watt, according to the company. Now, Huang revealed his ambitious roadmap for GPU, plotting the timeline between 2011 and 2013 with two new GPU architectures, dubbed Kepler and Maxwell. Kepler, scheduled to debut in 2011, is expected to push GPU performance to 4-6 DP GFLOPS per watt; Maxwell, targeted for 2013, will push it up to 14-16 DP GFLOPS per watt.