Nvidia’s next GTX architecture is rumoured to be called Ampere, not Volta
Nvidia’s next GTX architecture is rumoured to be called Ampere, not Volta
For a long time, gamers have expected Volta to be Nvidia’s successor to Pascal, though to say the least the evolutions seen in Nvidia’s Volta-based Tesla V100 GPU design do not evolve much over Pascal in many ways, aside from the addition of several compute-friendly features like FP64 support. Beyond that, the GPU’s key new features, the GPU’s Tensor cores, are completely useless for gaming without developers creating features specifically for these units.
This makes it extremely likely that Nvidia will not add Tensor cores to a gaming oriented product, saving die space and creating a GPU that is much cheaper to produce, though with the removal of this feature Volta loses its biggest feature addition when compared to Pascal.
If Nvidia decides to call their next GTX architecture Ampere, it shows that Nvidia is taking further steps towards differentiating their GTX and Tesla series of consumer gaming and compute GPUs, though this is something that will need to be proven with future releases and design roadmaps.
Today the compute and gaming GPU markets are very different, especially as the demand for AI compute hardware grows. As these markets differentiate Nvidia will be forced to differentiate their GPUs to provide peak levels of efficiency for each market, this can already be seen with the lack of dedicated FP64 hardware on GTX GPUs.
Please remember that this is just a rumour, so all of the information here should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
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