Nvidia begin sampling 28nm Kepler GPUs, going with a bottom-to-top release

In the past couple of years, Nvidia have always launched their flagship graphics cards first and then eventually filled up the mid-range and mainstream slots. AMD, on the other hand have always followed a different philosophy, they would release one mid-range and high-end card first and then later release the mainstream and flagship cards. While Nvidia’s next-gen Kepler GPU is still months away from release, we finally have some codenames and specifications of the mobile chips that will make their way to notebooks in 2012. The green giant is following bottom-to-top release, this time and the first chip to release would be the GK107.

Starting small this time around

The engineering samples of the GK107 are ready and will come in four SKUs - N13P-LP, N13P-GS, N13P-GT and N13E-GE. Furthermore, the chips will feature a 128-bit memory interface and support DDR3 and DDR5 memory types. The first three SKUs with the ‘P’ suffix will most likely be the successor to the GT 500M series. The last one, with the ‘E’ suffix could stand for enthusiast, in which case it will replace the GTX 560M. This move from Nvidia of starting with the entry-level chips will only help them since if our memory serves us correctly; they haven’t really had any great budget graphics cards for a while now. This will give them a chance to test out the new architecture and tweak it to get better yields.

The production samples of GK107 are expected sometime in January 2012. There’s still no word on the high-end chips, yet, which makes the wait all the more painful.