Kepler is here.  And it's fantastic!

The news came out today that the first Kepler GPU, the <a href="http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-680">GeForce GTX 680</a>, has been launched.  A single GPU has 1,536 CUDA Cores.  This means that those high-end workstations with 8 PCIe slots will be able to pack <strong>12,288 CUDA cores into a single computer</strong>.  That's some serious computational power.

Current high-end Fermi cards have 512 cores, so this new Kepler architecture boasts 3X the number of computation cores.

<img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-2449" title="geforce-gtx-680-style3-1000x580_gallery_preview" src="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/geforce-gtx-680-style3-1000x580_gallery_preview-300x174.png" alt="" width="300" height="174" />

Normally we focus on the higher-end Tesla products because those more aptly fit the needs of our science, engineering, and financial computing readers.  But we are excited nonetheless by this GeForce GPU.  It is a major step forward in GPU technology.  And this GeForce card portends great stuff for the technical-computing-focused Tesla revamp due out later this year.

As <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/codedivine/statuses/182876979354284034">@codedivine points out on Twitter</a>, "The only disappointment is that FP64 rate is very poor at 1/24 of FP32."  So we look forward to the Tesla parts boosting the relative double-precision allocation for compute purposes.

A whitepaper describing the new GeForce card is <a href="http://www.geforce.com/Active/en_US/en_US/pdf/GeForce-GTX-680-Whitepaper-FINAL.pdf">available for download</a>.  The default version comes with 2GB of memory.  Also, a big emphasis was placed on making it lower power.  These specs, combined with the big leap forward in computation cores, makes this a big day indeed for GPU computing.