2013 started off on a rather dull note for the PC graphics industry. NVIDIA launched its game console platform "Project: Shield," while AMD rebranded its eons-old GPUs to Radeon HD 8000M series. Apparently it could all change in late-February, with the arrival of a new high-end single-GPU graphics card based on NVIDIA's GK110 silicon, the same big chip that goes into making the company's Tesla K20 compute accelerator.

NVIDIA may have drawn some flack for extending its "GTX" brand extension too far into the mainstream and entry-level segment, and wants its GK110-based card to stand out. It is reported that NVIDIA will carve out a new brand extension, the GeForce Titan. Incidentally, the current fastest supercomputer in the world bears that name (Cray Titan, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The GK110 silicon physically packs 15 SMX units, totaling 2,880 CUDA cores. The chip features a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.