Rumors suggest that Nvidia's next generation Volta GPU will be launched this year and speculations surrounding the upcoming architecture are ramping up.
Nvidia Volta GPUs Lineup
According to Segment Next, we will be seeing the upcoming next-generation Volta architecture in 30 series Nvidia GPUs. It is highly likely that the 20 series GPUs will still be based on Nvidia Pascal refresh versions featuring more overclocking headroom and marginally better performance. According to speculations, the upcoming Nvidia Volta GPUs will be based on the 12 nm FinFET process recently devised by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
The 12nm FinFET process will allow that the upcoming GPUs will be more powerful as well as more efficient. Tech experts expect that Nvidia Volta GPUs will be coming out for supercomputers this year. However, the general public and especially gamers are more interested in gaming GPUs rather than deep learning or artificial intelligence. For them, the good news is that we can expect to see Nvidia Volta gaming GPUs in 2018.
The first Volta gaming GPUs will be the 30 series Nvidia GPUs, including their flagship GTX 3080. The GTX 3080 will feature a much faster memory called HBMs. We can also expect to see the GTX 3080 Ti at the high end of the 30 series GPUs lineup. When it comes to the mid-range, Nvidia is expected to launch the GTX 3070 that targets this GPU market.
All these Nvidia GPUs are expected to come on the market only in 2018. The 20 series GPUs that will include the GTX 2070 and the GTX 2080 will come in 2017. According to speculations, these will be priced lower than current GPUs but will be slightly better performing GPUs.
Volta GPUs' Features
According to Top 500, the supercomputing community is highly anticipating the introduction of NVIDIA's Volta GPU architecture. TSMC's 12 nm technology is a refinement of their 16 nm process used to manufacture NVIDIA's current Pascal GPUs. The next major process node is 10 nm and this is the process node that NVIDIA would certainly have wished to use for its upcoming Voltas.
Compared to its 16 nm process, TSMC is promising a 20 percent performance increase for the 10 nm technology. Only about half of that would probably be achieved with the 12 nm node. However, it is expected that future renditions of Volta GPUs will be manufactured on 10 nm or perhaps even 7 nm technology.
The next-generation Volta architecture isn't all about silicon shrinkage. It will also come with a reworked design with regard to its computational engine that powers all NVIDIA's GPUs, the streaming multiprocessor (SM). Irrespective of transistor size, the SM update is expected to deliver better power efficiency and performance than its Pascal predecessor.
Tech experts speculate that the design difference between Volta and Pascal will be much more significant than the one between Pascal and Maxwell. The Volta GPU is going to be the computational heart of two of the upcoming pre-exascale supercomputers, the Summit and Sierra. These are machines deployed by the US Department of Energy under the agency's CORAL (Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore) program.
