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Could NVIDIA Kepler be heading to mobile handsets in the future?

by Alistair Lowe on 26 March 2012, 10:50

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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We all knew that Kepler was an efficient little blighter, winning battles in the war for top-dog in the high-end GPU market whilst consuming under 195 watts. However, what we didn't expect, perhaps, is that NVIDIA's latest architecture might just be heading to new 'superphones' in the not too distant future.

Anandtech managed to grab a copy an e-mail from NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, to staff member detailing his intent to extend the Kepler design to mobile 'superphones':

From: Jensen H Huang
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 9:48 AM
To: Employees
Subject: Kepler Rising

Today, the first Kepler - GTX 680 - is on shelves around the world!

Three years in the making.  The endeavor of a thousand of the world's best engineers.  One vision - build a revolutionary GPU and make a giant leap in efficient-performance.

Achieving efficient-performance, great performance while consuming the least possible energy, required us to change our entire design approach.  Close collaboration between architecture-design-VLSI-software-devtech-systems, intense scrutiny on where energy is spent, and inventions at every level were necessary.  The results are fantastic as you will see in the reviews.

Kepler also cultivated a passion for craftsmanship - nothing wasted, everything put together with care - with a goal of creating an exquisite product that works wonderfully.  Let's continue to raise the bar and establish extraordinary craftsmanship as a hallmark of our company.

Today is just the beginning of Kepler.  Because of its super energy-efficient architecture, we will extend GPUs into datacenters, to super thin notebooks, to superphones. Not to mention bring joy and delight to millions of gamers around the world.

I want to thank all that gave your heart and soul to create Kepler. You've created something wonderful.

Congratulations everyone!

Jensen

 

We would certainly welcome NVIDIA's entry into DirectX 11+ and serious GPGPU compute on mobiles; it's possible that Kepler may have already crept its way into the already sampling Tegra 4 'Wayne' mobile chipset; with the architecture expected to feature support for DirectX 11+, OpenGL 4.X and accelerated PhysX, it would make sense for NVIDIA to use its most efficient, 28nm focused, DirectX 11 design. Other rumours suggest that the Tegra 4 will see its GPU core count double, with a super eight-core processor chip featuring even more GPU cores potentially in the works.

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Posted by kingpotnoodle - Mon 26 Mar 2012 11:40
I don't know how linearly power scales but 195W / 1536 “cores” makes less that 0.13W per core, so could imagine 10-20 “cores” being possible in phone type environment, maybe more in a tablet.
Posted by crossy - Mon 26 Mar 2012 12:05
We would certainly welcome NVIDIA's entry into DirectX 11+ and serious GPGPU compute on mobiles; it's possible that Kepler may have already crept its way into the already sampling Tegra 4 ‘Wayne’ mobile chipset; with the architecture expected to feature support for DirectX 11+, OpenGL 4.X and accelerated PhysX, it would make sense for NVIDIA to use its most efficient, 28nm focused, DirectX 11 design. Other rumours suggest that the Tegra 4 will see its GPU core count double, with a super eight-core processor chip featuring even more GPU cores potentially in the works.
Read this and two thoughts occurred, first off that the pace of Tegra development is pretty frantic - it's surely no exaggeration to say that T4 is “this year's model” and presumably we'll see a T4X/T5 for 2013. Going to make my ole Tegra2-powered tablet look very shabby very shortly. :(

Second thing, decent graphics performance (/watt of course!) could make Windows 8 tablets quite attractive as gaming platforms. Perhaps even (heresy approacheth) NVidia and Microsoft could team up to do a portable device to give the PSP Vita a run for it's money in the “action” gaming market?
Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH - Mon 26 Mar 2012 12:06
Maybe Nvidia should look at equipping their SOCs with more memory bandwidth in the first place?? Tacking on more cores is not going to help if their SOCs are already memory bandwidth limited when compared to all their competitors. The Apple A5 and A5X have faster graphics core but have more memory bandwidth to play with.

crossy
Perhaps even (heresy approacheth) NVidia and Microsoft could team up to do a portable device to give the PSP Vita a run for it's money in the “action” gaming market?

What about X86 SOCs?? The next generation AMD and Intel SOCs will have much improved graphics performance. AFAIK,the next generation 22NM Atom will have a graphics core derived from IB.
Posted by Biscuit - Mon 26 Mar 2012 12:06
Well when you consider the cores are not the only part of the card, there will be a number of other chips which are required (VRAM?). I couldnt tell you which parts would be needed when moving to a smaller chipset but i suspect the scale would be far from linear.
Posted by Scribe - Mon 26 Mar 2012 13:50
Biscuit
Well when you consider the cores are not the only part of the card, there will be a number of other chips which are required (VRAM?). I couldnt tell you which parts would be needed when moving to a smaller chipset but i suspect the scale would be far from linear.

I'd presume we'd see more cores and lower clock speeds as opposed to simple core scaling, as high speeds would be pointless when faced with LPDDR3, which, whilst it delivers bandwidth, doesn't deliver fast responses vs GDDR5, more cores would help mask the latency. Likewise, cache is going to dip no doubt, if you consider the current 512KB is for 4 controllers, we'll be seeing something more like 128KB, if running along-side ARM cores it would be interesting to see if NVIDIA does anything special with the cache.

Also whilst cores may not scale 1 for 1, don't forget that with each SMX removed, there's a bunch of control logic, polymorph, texture units and lv1 cache being dropped from the design too, all which contribute to power. Since the device may very well share the phone's RAM we could actually take this away from the 680's power rating.