President and CEO of Nvidia Jen-Hsun Huang speaks at the 2014 AUDI CES Keynote presentation at The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on January 6, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo : Getty Images/Gabe Ginsberg)
A handful of leaked information regarding NVidia's next-gen Volta GPUs on Baidu forums is hinting that the tech giant will not remain stashed away even as AMD enthusiasts use the upcoming Vega 10 GPUs to browbeat NVidia fans.
To begin with, the credibility of NVidia Volta GV100 GPU leaks cannot be doubted as the source, a Baidu forum member named USG Ishimura, is known for giving accurate leaks on hardware. The last leak from him signifies that NVidia's next architecture, after Pascal will be Volta and will be much revamped and fast compared to AMD's upcoming Vega.
Just like its Pascal-based predecessor, NVidia Volta architecture will be first aimed at High-Performance Computing (HPC) and then proceed to the consumer market. Reports point at a GTC 2017 unveiling by NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who will also showcase the latest NVidia roadmap with new code names and tech details of upcoming chips.
According to The Motley Fool, the Volta architecture will drive NVidia to 7nm process straight from 10nm with all the upcoming GPUs expected to support GDDR6 and HBM3 memory standards. However, the earliest availability of these graphics cards for consumer markets will be 2018.
A bigger part of 2017 will be spanned by Pascal refresh, whose architecture will be fully tuned for next-gen games. Volta will then take over, bringing with it GDDR6 technology and 16 GB of VRAM capacities on 245-bit cards.
Already, this is a doubled increase over the likes of GTX 1080 and 1070, which means improved efficiency and high performance. A GV102 GPU will further feature a 384-bit bus with 24 and 48GB of VRAM, depending on the variant.
Based on the fact that GDDR6 is slated for a 2018 launch, it is well inclined with consumer launch of consumer Volta GPUs. It is also backed by NVidia's partnership with Samsung and Micron, which has seen several successes in the memory industry.
According to WFFCtech, although NVidia Volta will be fully compliant with HBM2, products with this technology will be focused on specialized markets. Currently, the only NVidia Pascal chip with HBM2 is GP100 and is focused on HPC. The company might follow the same road with Volta to integrate it in an HPC chip as well.
As NVidia prepares to unveil Volta in 2018, AMD will have launched its Vega 10. But that is not all. Rumors disclose that AMD is also preparing to launch its next-gen architecture dubbed Navi. Seemingly, the battle for winning the bigger share in the graphics card market will not have a winner unless further production ceases, which is utterly impossible.
Here is a video overview of what is expected with Volta:
