News - NVIDIA reveals upcoming GPU architectures

[HEXUS]

Kepler and Maxwell will power next-generation cards.

Read more.

[kalniel]

Performance per watt.. who'd have thought?

[GheeTsar]

Seems kinda wishful/aspirational rather than informed projections to me, but then what do I know?

[Percy1983]

Well now AMD are dropping the ATI maybe nvidia are trying to become the new ATI?

[Pandora92]

I think it's an excellent idea for NVIDIA to be focusing on PPW and efficiency after what happened with the original GF100 architecture, but it's interesting to note that Fermi actually has better PPW than Tesla did, just because you get a lot of performance for every watt the card uses doesn't mean it's not going to use a hell of a lot of them and still run extremely hot.

Still, it should be an interesting battle between the Kepler architecture and AMD's 7000 series (presuming Northern Islands is released around the same time). Although I guess it remains to be seen if NVIDIA can even match the timeframe given within that roadmap, considering how long it took them to finalize Fermi.

[Fraz]

but it's interesting to note that Fermi actually has better PPW than Tesla did, just because you get a lot of performance for every watt the card uses doesn't mean it's not going to use a hell of a lot of them and still run extremely hot.

You'd have to be a right muppet not to get better performance per watt whilst transitioning to a lower process size. If the process size halves, then you get 4 transistors where previously you had just one. There'll be differences in leakage current for your smaller transistors, but you should certainly end up with at least twice the performance per watt afterwards.

What I'd be interested to see is the performance per watt per transistor. Then you factor out the gains Moore's Law give you.

"transistors are free, power is not"

Sweet. Can I have 3 billion of your transistors in the form of a GTX 480 then please Jen-Hsun?