Update April 19, 2017: We just lately reported Volta IDs had been uncovered within the among the newest Nvidia drivers and now it appears the brand new GeForce graphics structure is likely to be coming ahead of anticipated this 12 months.
Check out our choose of the best graphics cards round at the moment.
A Chinese web site, MyDrivers.com, has acknowledged they count on new Volta GPUs to reach within the third quarter of this 12 months. That’s quite a bit sooner than anybody thought and the hypothesis is Nvidia are being pushed to speed up the Volta graphics card launch due to elevated competitors from AMD making the graphics market a a lot harder place.
There are not any sources pointed to within the article, so it’s alll too attainable it’s a purely speculative piece. The machine IDs discovered within the latest drivers appear to reference the GV100 GPU which might be the large-scale professional-class processor and never any gaming/consumer-focused playing cards.
The worrisome a part of the article for me although is the place they recommend the GeForce 20-series of merchandise will see re-planning of the costs and market positions which “will increase the price of single card to enhance profits.” My understanding of Chinese is fairly woeful (learn: nonexistent) so I’m counting on Mr. Google Robot’s comprehension expertise, so it’s attainable there’s a misunderstanding born of the interpretation into English.
But if true, and the costs of single playing cards are being adjusted upwards, that may be the second technology in a row the place Nvidia have pushed costs skywards. With the 10-series Pascal-based playing cards the GTX 1080 was launched at an unprecedented degree, particularly when taking the reference/Founders Edition shenanigans under consideration.
If $699 goes to turn out to be the de facto customary for Nvidia’s high-end graphics playing cards, as proven with the GTX 1080 FE and GTX 1080 Ti playing cards, then these are worrying occasions. Unless you’re AMD and assured you possibly can hold undercutting Nvidia’s GPUs with your personal upcoming Vega graphics cards.
For our half we’d nonetheless be very shocked to see consumer-led Volta playing cards arriving this 12 months. With the updated GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 cards arriving alongside the high-powered GTX 1080 Ti Nvidia have already made a powerful begin to 2017 and to launch a high-end GTX 2080 competitor for the GTX 1080 Ti in six months time would appear like an odd transfer.
Personally I believe it’s extra probably for Nvidia to begin speaking about, and perhaps displaying off, Volta silicon at their upcoming Graphics Technology Conference. I can see Jen-Hsun on stage with a GV100 based mostly half, constructed for the skilled, super-computer market, with the trickle down following an identical sample to the 2015 unveiling and 2016 launch of the Pascal professional and consumer-class GPUs.
That would put potential GTX 2080 and GTX 2070 graphics playing cards on cabinets round March 2018. Now I am the one being speculative…
Update February 21, 2017: The first cases of Nvidia’s subsequent technology graphics structure have been uncovered within the wild. The makers of benchmarking software AIDA64 have discovered the massive Volta chip ID within the newest Nvidia drivers.
According to a submit on Videocardz the Finalwire programmers had been making an attempt to unearth some traces of the upcoming GTX 1080 Ti, however as a substitute discovered reference to the massive Volta GPU, the GV100.
First signal of the brand new nVIDIA flagship GPU, codenamed Volta has appeared on the horizon and its PCI machine ID is 1D81 = Graphics Device GV100
— AIDA64 (@AIDA64_Official) February 20, 2017
We’re anticipating to listen to extra about Volta on the Graphics Technology Conference in May and this would appear to recommend engineering variations of the chip are able to be toyed with. Looks like we’ll have a contented Jen-Hsun on stage waving round Volta silicon in a few months.
Before all that although we’ll have some extra Pascal goodness to play with.
Original story, Janaury 25, 2017: We haven’t even had the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti but, however that gained’t cease the hearsay mill grinding onwards in direction of the Volta GPU structure to comply with it.
There have been many figures thrown round as to simply what transistor lithography Nvidia shall be jamming into their next-gen Volta graphics playing cards, with the most recent being a return to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for the manufacturing of 12nm Volta GPUs, having just lately dallied with Samsung for his or her 14nm GP107 silicon.
Originally Volta was purported to be sporting the 10nm course of, however the tempo of transistor shrinkage has turn out to be slightly laggardly lately. The final hearsay had Nvidia sticking with TSMC’s 16nm tech so as to have the ability to persist with their roadmap and get precise Volta playing cards on the cabinets in 2018.
The 10nm course of from TSMC, not like Intel’s Cannonlake design, is anticipated to be extra of a stop-gap measure between their present course of and the just about legendary 7nm lithography. To put that into perspective 7nm is in regards to the top of three Tom Cruises standing on one another’s shoulders.
TSMC have although introduced one other stop-gap measure which they’re calling 12nm. It’s based mostly on their present 16nm design, with density, efficiency and power effectivity enhancements, however whether or not it’ll genuinely be full of 12nm transistors or whether or not it’s simply going to be intelligent advertising is about as clear as thermal paste.
The hearsay is that Nvidia will now be taking TSMC’s up to date 12nm design for his or her Volta GPUs to reinforce the brand new structure’s personal efficiency and energy enhancements with the additional bump of a shrunken lithography.
We had been anticipating to get a glimpse of Nvidia’s Volta GPU tech at their upcoming Graphics Technology Conference in May. Pascal was unveiled at 2015’s GTC earlier than showing in skilled kind later that 12 months with consumer-class GPUs showing in 2016.
I’m unsure if Nvidia are going to have the ability to comply with that timeline with Volta, nevertheless, because the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s new Summit supercomputer, which was initially designed to launch with Volta GPUs this 12 months, has been pushed again to 2018. The Summit website has just lately been partially modified to element the 2018 launch.
The different Volta GPU noises are that it’s going to seem sporting both GDDR6 or HBM2 at completely different ranges of card. GDDR6 is reportedly in a position to ship reminiscence speeds of 16Gbps, up from the present 10Gbps that GDDR5X is able to.
Before all that although we’re anticipating Nvidia to launch a slew of refreshed Pascal GPUs this 12 months to maintain us all upgrading our rigs in addition to potentially a new Titan too. Whether that’s a case of providing GDDR5X reminiscence throughout the breadth of their vary, or switching all their GPUs to the Samsung 14nm manufacturing course of we don’t know, however we’d be leaning extra to the previous than the latter.
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