Nvidia’s Volta architecture is now rumoured to release in Q3 2017

Previous rumours have suggested that Volta will be based on TSMC’s 12nm manufacturing process, a process that is, in fact, an improved version of their 16nm process. This should make Volta more power efficient than Pascal, even when discounting other improvements that Nvidia has made to Volta’s design. 

If Volta is releasing in 2017, we can assume that Nvidia will not be using GDDR6 memory, since the earliest estimates for the release of that memory type is in early 2018. 

One other possibility is that Nvidia will announce Volta in Q3 2017 for HPC/server/AI compute market, releasing a high-end product in limited quantities to select partners. This is pretty much what Nvidia did with the release of their Pascal P100 server GPU, releasing “Big Pascal” to the compute market long before it ever reaches consumers.

At this time it is hard to tell what exactly Nvidia is planning with Volta, as it is far too early to tell if these rumours or true and if AMD’s Vega architecture is even worthy of such a large reaction from Nvidia. 

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