Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs are reportedly arriving in 1H 2020

While a 1H 2020 release has been reported, relatively little is known about Nvidia’s next-generation graphics architecture, aside from the rumours that it will move Nvidia to a 7nm lithography node. 

Our guess is that 7nm Ampere graphics cards will move Nvidia back to its traditional GPU release schedule, where they will start with a high-end (but not top-tier offering) to replace the RTX 2080 Ti with lower pricing and power consumption levels. Think of it like the Maxwell to Pascal shift, where the GTX 1080 replaced the GTX 980 Ti with a smaller lithography node and the promise of more performance per dollar. 

If Nvidia moved back to its traditional GPU release schedule, would start with the release of RTX 3070/RTX 3080 class graphics cards. This would leave space for a Titan series GPU at the top of the range and an RTX 3080 Ti series GPU waiting in the wings to respond to potential high-end competition from Radeon. After the RTX 3070/80 release, Nvidia would then release RTX 3060 and lower-end graphics cards on the new architecture. Typically, the higher-end model waits in the wings to counter planned high-end launches from AMD.  

While most of this article is little more than hearsay, it is hard to argue that Nvidia has little reason to release ultra-high-end Ampere series GPUs on day-1 without sufficient competition from Radeon. After all, a trump card is best played tactically. 

Ampere is expected to bring forward architectural improvements that will boost Nvidia’s raytracing performance while using a newer lithography node to increase transistor density and increase the architecture’s performance/watt characteristics. This should allow Ampere to deliver higher levels of efficiency than AMD’s RDNA/Navi architecture.