Rumor Has It NVIDIA’s Volta Will Arrive Later in 2017
Things are heating up in the GPU space as AMD looks to enter the high-end market with its Vega GPU. Vega will be priced competitively, likely creating a price war between AMD and NVIDIA.
May 8 2017, Updated 4:05 p.m. ET
NVIDIA’s Volta surrounded by rumors
NVIDIA (NVDA) launched several gaming GPUs (graphics processing unit) for the high-, mid-, and low-end markets in 2016.
However, things are heating up in the GPU space as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) looks to enter the high-end market with its Vega GPU. Vega will be priced competitively, likely creating a price war between AMD and NVIDIA. Moreover, falling GPU sales will likely pressure NVIDIA to launch its next-generation Volta GPU as early as possible.
What do rumors say about Volta’s launch date?
A Tweak Town report citing Chinese website MyDrivers stated that NVIDIA could pre-pone the launch of its Volta GPU to 3Q17. The website further stated that the company’s Volta GPUs would be labeled under the GTX 20 series, with the low-end GTX 2080 arriving in 3Q17 and the high-end Titan series arriving in early 2018.
Tweak Town believes that NVIDIA’s future gaming GPU roadmap will appear as follows:
- GTX 2070, GTX 2080, and Titan Xv are expected to launch later in 2017.
- GTX 2070 Ti and GTX 2080 Ti are expected to launch in early or mid-2018.
According to a Fudzilla report, the first Volta GPU will be used for data center, deep learning, and artificial intelligence technologies, as they are higher-margin markets.
These rumors come after news arrived that AMD would launch its Vega GPU by the end of fiscal 2Q16. Many analysts expect AMD to launch Vega before or after COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2017 between May 30 and June 3, 2017.
Rumors surrounding Volta’s process node
Earlier, there were rumors that NVIDIA would build its next-generation Volta GPUs on 10 nm (nanometer) nodes. A smaller node would improve performance and reduce power consumption. However, the latest update from Taiwan’s (EWT) newspaper Commercial Times stated that Volta would be built on TSMC’s (TSM) 12 nm node.
On the other hand, AMD will build its Vega GPU on Global Foundries’ 14 nm process node, the same node on which Polaris GPU was built.
However, a process node alone doesn’t determine the performance of a GPU. There are other key differentiators, one of which is memory. In the next article, we’ll look at the kinds of memory AMD’s Vega and NVIDIA’s Volta will feature.
