Kepler (microarchitecture)

Kepler is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, first introduced at retail in April 2012, as the successor to the Fermi microarchitecture. Kepler was Nvidia's first microarchitecture to focus on energy efficiency. Most GeForce 600 series, most GeForce 700 series, and some GeForce 800M series GPUs were based on Kepler, all manufactured in 28 nm. Kepler found use in the GK20A, the GPU component of the Tegra K1 SoC, and in the Quadro Kxxx series, the Quadro NVS 510, and Tesla computing modules.

Kepler was followed by the Maxwell microarchitecture and used alongside Maxwell in the GeForce 700 series and GeForce 800M series.

The architecture is named after Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and key figure in the 17th century Scientific Revolution.

Overview

The goal of Nvidia's previous architecture was design focused on increasing performance on compute and tessellation. With the Kepler architecture, Nvidia targeted their focus on efficiency, programmability, and performance. The efficiency aim was achieved through the use of a unified GPU clock, simplified static scheduling of instruction and higher emphasis on performance per watt. By abandoning the shader clock found in their previous GPU designs, efficiency is increased, even though it requires additional cores to achieve higher levels of performance.