It's been nearly 6 months since the launch of the first Kepler GPUs, and due to 28nm production difficulties NVIDIA has spent the last 6 months with a sizable hole in their video card lineup between their high-end and budget cards. Since the launch of the GTX 680 in March, NVIDIA has launched the GTX 670 and much more recently the GTX 660 Ti to help close that gap, but they have still been in need of a true midrange GPU for mainstream cards. Today that hole is filling being filled, as NVIDIA is ready to launch the 3rd and final consumer Kepler GPU for the year. With GK104 at the high-end and GK107 at the low-end, the task of filling out the middle will fall to NVIDIA’s latest GPU: GK106.
As given away by the model number, GK106 is designed to fit in between GK104 and GK107. GK106 offers a more modest collection of functional blocks in exchange for a smaller die size and lower power consumption, making it a perfect fit for NVIDIA’s mainstream desktop products. GK106’s launch vehicle will be the GeForce GTX 660, the central member of NVIDIA’s mainstream video card lineup. GTX 660 is designed to come in between GTX 660 Ti and GTX 650 (also launching today), bringing Kepler and its improved performance down to the same $230 price range that the GTX 460 launched at nearly two years ago. NVIDIA has had a tremendous amount of success with the GTX 560 and GTX 460 families, so they’re looking to maintain this momentum with the GTX 660.
