Fresh off the rumor mill we have another wild one. According to Igor Wallossek of Tom's Hardware Germany, NVIDIA is allegedly launching its brand new Turing graphics architecture in July for the gaming segment. Igor, who's the same individual that leaked NVIDIA's Ampere codename last year, claims that there's been a switcheroo of sorts.
NVIDIA is now said to be planning to replace its existing Pascal powered GeForce gaming lineup with a brand new graphics architecture code named "Turing" around July. "Ampere" on the other hand is now said to be a Volta successor in the compute, HPC & AI / machine learning markets.
| 2010/11 | 2012 | 2015/15 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gaming (GeForce) | Fermi | Kepler | Maxwell | Pascal | Turing |
| HPC (Tesla) | Volta | Ampere |
NVIDIA Turing Architecture is Designed For Gaming, Allegedly Launching in July - Ampere to Succeed Volta in Compute Markets by End of March
This switch is somewhat unintuitive as Alan Turing has been famous for his work in the fields of computer science and cryptanalysis. Which makes the use of his name more suitable for a graphcis architecture that's targeted towards professional applications, rather than gaming. Although, this latest update comes straight from the same source that leaked Ampere to begin with, so we're inclined to believe that it has some credibility.
Ampere which has reportedly been in production since late January is expected to be revealed at GTC later this month between the 26th and 29th. Turing on the other hand will only enter production in June with an announcement expected that month, at Computex in Taipei Taiwan. A hard launch is said to follow a month later in July.
This suggests that NVIDIA's alleged GeForce GTX 20 series lineup, including the GTX 1180 and 1170 will not actually be released later this month, but rather debut in June and hit shelves in July. Whilst a successor to the Volta V100 accelerator based on the Ampere architecture is what we'll probably see an announcement for later this month at GTC.
Regardless of codenames, the facts around the hardware specifications of the new GeForce series are still the same. We're still looking at a GP104/GTX 1080 class chip replacement in the summer, built on TSMC's 12nm process technology and featuring 16gbps GDDR6 memory from Samsung.
As always, remember to take this rumor, as with any other, with the necessary dose of NaCl. We should get a much better idea of what NVIDIA's GPU roadmap looks like at GTC later this month. It seems the rumors are pouring in and won't stop anytime soon. I'd urge extra caution in the meantime especially when dealing with conflicting information like what we've been seeing lately.
