How NVIDIA will address the seemingly rising challenge coming from AMD's Vega 10 and 11 GPUs? If rumors are correct, the reigning graphics card king will unleash anytime in 2017 the GeForce GTX 20 card series, which will run in enhanced Pascal architecture, and to be followed by NVIDIA's new Volta GPU platform.
In a report, The Motley Fool said that NVIDIA is ramping up the mass production of the Volta GPU class that likely will launch in the second half of 2017. The family of GPU cards will be manufactured on custom 12-nanometer process that promises improved performance and more efficient power consumption.
Volta, according to the same report, "should offer a solid enhancement from Pascal," and is being described in supply chain rumors as the "smaller version" of the 16nm chip technology. The GPU when launched is set to deliver "fundamental architectural gains," The Motley Fool added on its report.
But prior to Volta's arrival, NVIDIA will first rollout the GTX 20 series that basically will represent a slight step up from Pascal, WCCFTech reported. And part of the effort or tweak of the GeForce GTX card lineup is the looming introduction of "faster and cheaper updated versions of ... the existing GTX 1000 series lineup," the report added.
This indicates that NVIDIA is meeting head-on not only the Vega GPUs from AMD but also the latter's Radeon RX 500 series cards that are powerful and affordable at the same time.
It is expected that the flagship card under the NVIDIA GeForce 20 series is initially the GTX 1080 Ti that will soon be followed by the GTX 2080 Ti, WCCFTech said, adding that the card series "would be based on the GP102 GPU powering the company's flagship GeForce GTX Titan X."
Also in the cards are the replacements for the GTX 1050, 1060 and 1070 that likely will be known as GTX 20150, 2060 and GTX 2070 with possible Ti variants, and all boasting of GDDR5X memory with increased number of CUDA cores.
The NVIDIA Volta GPUs, however, are likely to generate the most interest from enthusiasts as the family of cards is said to come out with GDDR6 and HBM2 memory technology. The same report indicated that the full-blown Volta release will involve the NVIDIA GV110, GV102 and GV104 GPUs but will only be seen starting on 2018.
NVIDIA's Volta graphics card are geared for supercomputing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, or the same arena that the AMD Vega 10, 11 and 20 GPUs are designed for. So it should be an epic AMD-NVIDIA slugfest this 2017 as well as next year.