As reported on February 7th, we got a first glimpse of the rumored specifications for Nvidia's Kepler based graphics cards. The leaked specifications were met with both "wow.. can't wait" and "wow... those are so fake why even post" from both sides of the comment fence. Now, we are starting to get more pieces of information on the upcoming Kepler series. Based on information coming out of German-based 3dcenter.org, we may have a clearer picture of the true specifications for Kepler GK104.

Outside of the switch to the 28 nm process, one of the major changes in the Kepler architecture is to allow for more CUDA cores. This is achieved by no longer having shader frequency, just GPU frequency. Each Stream Multiprocessor will contain 96 CUDA cores, unlike the 32 - 48 that Fermi had. This change in layout of the CUDA cores will have the GK104 sporting up to 1536 CUDA cores, which is a big boost from GF110 and GTX 580. The number of texture units have doubled from 64 to 128 on GK104. The GK104 will only have 32 ROPS versus 48 in GF110 but it shouldn't affect performance compared to the Fermi.

*BSN: Iillustration of GK104 CUDA Core Arrangement

The above GK104 architectural overview comes from Bright Side of News.

Nvidia Kepler GK104:

28nm production at TSMC,

Die size 340mm²

4 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC)

4 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) per GPC = 16 SM

96 Stream Processors (SP) per SM = 1536 CUDA cores

8 Texture Units (TMU) per SM = 128 TMUs

32 Raster OPeration Units (ROPs)

Chip clock (top model): 950 MHz

1250 MHz actual (5.00 GHz effective) memory, 160 GB/s memory bandwidth

256-bit DDR memory interface (up to GDDR5)

2048 MB (2 GB) memory amount standard

2.9 TFLOP/s single-precision floating point compute power

486 GFLOP/s double-precision floating point compute power

Elimination of Hotclocks

The GK104's performance is expected to exceed the GTX 580 at the $350 to $400 price range. In addition, it is expected to outperform AMD's HD 7950 at similar price point and challenge the HD 7970 for the performance crown. The GK104 looks to be the similar to the current generation GTX 560 Ti with regards to price to performance in its category.

Please keep in mind, of course, that these specifications are from 3dcenter's supposed reliable source. We won't know for sure until Nvidia shows its hand. Stay tuned!