As we reported on a few days ago, Nvidia released a teaser picture via its GeForce Facebook page, in the process setting what may be a world record number of ‘likes’ per genuinely visible pixel. Along with some wilder stabs in the dark, the most widely held opinion (including ours) has been that this was the GTX 690, combining two GTX 680s in one card. The theory of an impending GTX 690 release gained significant ground when Swedish site Sweclockers (yes you’re a genius if you would’ve guessed they were Swedish from the name) citing sources confirming this was indeed the GTX 690 and “the week beginning April 30th” would see its release - which sounds an awful lot like an Nvidia leak. Visual backup to this was then provided by pretty reputable leak-attracting Chinese site inpai.
While the circumstantial evidence stacks up heavily towards a dual GTX 690, there is still some ambiguity. One certainty is that Nvidia’s upcoming GPU Technology Conference has a seminar on the 16th of May named ‘Inside Kepler’ which details “individuals from the GPU architecture and CUDA software groups [diving] into the features of the compute architecture for ‘Kepler’ – NVIDIA’s new 7-billion transistor GPU”. Now to be fair two GK-104 GPUs would indeed add up to 7 Billion transistors (at 3.5 Billion each) and there are several separate seminars discussing multi-GPU compute programming for Kepler. However listing an architecture transistor count of 7 Billion would historically strongly imply Nvidia has a 7 Billion transistor single-GPU up its sleeve so this is a cryptic snippet at best. It makes make little sense to release both, so it is still just possible the card is the rumoured single GPU ‘Big Kepler’ (GK-110). For now our money remains on a dual-GPU card though.
At this point we can say a fair bit more with than we could few days ago: something’s coming from Nvidia, it has a whopping 7 Billion Transistors and should be released within the next two weeks.
