If you were reading our LiveBlog of the GTC2010 Keynote Speech, then you saw the note about the Product Roadmap. NVidia has historically been pretty secretive with roadmaps, particularly with the press, but this time Jen-Hsun threw up a single slide announcing not only the names of their upcoming 2 new products, but estimated performance figures and dates.

The two new products:

  • Kepler – To be released sometime in 2011, 28nm process.  Estimated double-precision Gigaflops performance of 4-6GFlops per watt.
  • Maxwell – To be released sometime in 2013, 22nm process.  Estimated double-precision Gigaflops performance of 15-16 GFlops per watt, making is about 16x better than the Fermi-driven cards.

How can they expect to hit these unbelievable numbers?  First off, they’re going to work on reducing the process size (Fermi is at 40nm) so simply cutting down to 28nm would allow a significantly quantity of extra transistors to be added.  However, that’s not the only thing that will have to happen.  Beyond that, NVidia wouldn’t say much more than “architectural changes” similar to what happened with Fermi.

I was, personally, very glad to see NVidia presenting figures in Performance Per Watt, as in Jen-Hsun’s words:

Math is Free.  Transistors are Free.  Power is expensive.  Performance Per Watt = Performance.

And this translates through their entire product portfolio.  The changes that will enable this kind of performance on the high-end will also show up in the consumer-side (GeForce) as improved gaming performance, better PhysX, and more real-time raytracing, and it will show up on the mobile side as improved Tegra chipsets (CUDA in the power of your hand??!).