Nvidia warming up for Kepler launch

The company has just begun shipping a processor known as Fermi and it is due to be followed by Kepler manufactured on 28nm process technology in the second-half of 2011 and then by Maxwell two years after that. Kepler is expected to provide three to four times the performance of Fermi.

"We expect to go to production later next year, the design is progressing very rapidly. There are hundreds of engineers working on it," CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said of Kepler, according to a Reuters report.

Nvidia has an established position as a maker of graphics processors and graphics cards but faces a change in the market as PC processor makers Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. start integrating GPUs within the CPU.

Nvidia is moving in the same direction by integrating its own GPUs with processing cores licensed from ARM Holdings plc under the Tegra brand.

"The Tegra business is probably a year behind my goals. However, the Tegra 2 uptake, as I hope you will see later in the year, is really quite phenomenal," Reuters quoted Huang saying.