Thursday, April 20th 2017
NVIDIA's Volta Reportedly Poised for Anticipated, Early Q3 2017 Launch
According to a report from Chinese website MyDrivers, NVIDIA is looking to spruce things up on its line-up with a much earlier than expected Q3 Volta Launch. Remember that Volta was expected, according to NVIDIA's own road-maps, to launch around early 2018. The report indicates that NVIDIA's Volta products - apparently to be marketed as the GeForce 20-series - will see an early launch due to market demands, and NVIDIA's intention to further increase pricing of its products through a new-generation launch.
These stand, for now, as only rumors (and not the first time they've surfaced at that), but paint a pretty interesting picture, nonetheless. Like Intel with its Coffee Lake series, pushing a product launch to earlier than expected has consequences: production, logistics, infrastructure, product roadmaps, and stock of existing previous-generation products must all be taken into account. And with NVIDIA just recently having introduced its performance-champions GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp graphics cards, all of this seems a trigger pull too early - especially when taking into account the competition landscape in high-performance graphics, which is akin to a single green-colored banner poised atop the Himalayas. And NVIDIA must not forget the fact that AMD could be pulling a black swan off its engineering department with Vega, like it did with its Ryzen series of CPUs.
Any new Volta products would most likely use HBM2 or GDDR5X memory, considering that Micron itself is looking to begin sampling its GDDR6 products towards the end of 2017 or early 2018. With AMD's Vega languishing in the corner as we expect it to finally make an appearance, which also carries HBM2 memory, it would be expected that its availability is good enough to power multiple graphics cards from both vendors. And if previous rumors are true, the usage of a cutting-edge 12 nm process is also in the works.
The only reason I see NVIDIA pulling Volta's Launch to 3Q2017 is to steal some thunder from AMD's expected 2Q2017 Vega launch, looking to stay buyer's hands from jumping ship. If there were some products to be launched, I would expect a Pascal refresh until 2018's actual GeForce-branded Volta, especially considering how NVIDIA can easily put its mainstream GPUs in direct competition to AMD's recently released RX 500 series. Volta being launched for the HPC market, however, makes sense: NVIDIA's "Datacenter" revenue is posting the company's greatest increases QoQ and YoY. It is, in potential, a much more lucrative market than its gaming segment, and it would make total sense to see NVIDIA pulling its Volta architecture towards the HPC market, much like the company did with its GP100 Pascal chip.
Sources:
MyDrivers, ETeknix, The Motley Fool
These stand, for now, as only rumors (and not the first time they've surfaced at that), but paint a pretty interesting picture, nonetheless. Like Intel with its Coffee Lake series, pushing a product launch to earlier than expected has consequences: production, logistics, infrastructure, product roadmaps, and stock of existing previous-generation products must all be taken into account. And with NVIDIA just recently having introduced its performance-champions GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp graphics cards, all of this seems a trigger pull too early - especially when taking into account the competition landscape in high-performance graphics, which is akin to a single green-colored banner poised atop the Himalayas. And NVIDIA must not forget the fact that AMD could be pulling a black swan off its engineering department with Vega, like it did with its Ryzen series of CPUs.
The only reason I see NVIDIA pulling Volta's Launch to 3Q2017 is to steal some thunder from AMD's expected 2Q2017 Vega launch, looking to stay buyer's hands from jumping ship. If there were some products to be launched, I would expect a Pascal refresh until 2018's actual GeForce-branded Volta, especially considering how NVIDIA can easily put its mainstream GPUs in direct competition to AMD's recently released RX 500 series. Volta being launched for the HPC market, however, makes sense: NVIDIA's "Datacenter" revenue is posting the company's greatest increases QoQ and YoY. It is, in potential, a much more lucrative market than its gaming segment, and it would make total sense to see NVIDIA pulling its Volta architecture towards the HPC market, much like the company did with its GP100 Pascal chip.
42 Comments on NVIDIA's Volta Reportedly Poised for Anticipated, Early Q3 2017 Launch
a1... maybe... but who cares, maybe they dont have tons of stock?
b1... maybe... some cant wait up to 5 months from now...most wont know its there until its out anyway.
a2. No.
b2. No.
c2. Most plausible thing said here IMO. :p
I would be surprised if GV102 has more CUDA's than GP102, and at the same time being 12nm.
I think the more likely scenario is GTX 2070 2880 / 16GB / 12 GBps GDDR5X and GTX 2080 3840 / 16GB / 12 GBps.
It's not coming to the consumer market any time soon, because there is absolutely no need. All AMD can offer right now is shitty rebrands or mainstream mediocrity.
Good thing for the monitor's G-Sync, otherwise games like ME:Andromeda would be unplayable.
Given that, Volta in Q3 is quite plausible. Pascal is really just Maxwell v3, so NVIDIA have had a lot of time to actually design a new GPU architecture; alternatively, Volta could simply be Maxwell v4/Pascal v2.
It's gone quiet recently but I'm repeating a well versed mantra about release dates.
Again, sorry to offend you.
* Pascal is actually Maxwell v3. Which means NVIDIA has basically had since Maxwell v1 to design a brand-new architecture (Volta v1). Given that, it is plausible that Volta v1 is done and ready for release in Q3.
* Alternatively, if "Volta" is just Maxwell v4/Pascal v2 with a few tweaks, then NVIDIA could release it at pretty much any time, and are just holding out until Q3 to clear stock of current Pascal cards.
* Third option (which I didn't mention before but is a possibility) is that "Volta" is just a rebrand of Pascal. I don't see this as particularly likely since it would give no benefit to NVIDIA or its partners, who would now have "Volta 2000 series" cards to sell while they still have an inventory of Pascal 1000 series to clear.
My personal belief is that Volta will be a new arch and NVIDIA will be releasing it in Q3 to business only (similar to the Tesla P100 mezzanine cards). This makes the most sense because businesses are much more willing to pay top dollar for new tech because they need the performance that tech provides, whereas consumers are generally happy with "fast enough" and longer upgrade cycles - and considering the very fast GTX 1080 Ti was released less than a month ago, few consumers will be willing to upgrade so soon.
Also I don't think NVIDIA is particularly concerned with Vega at this time; they have made it very clear that they are competing against themselves. They could have released GP104-200 (GTX 1070's GPU) as the GTX 1080 Titan Xp and had the 1080 and 1070 be slower than they are, and they still would've beat Polaris with ease. If they had done that with the same prices, then I'd say they were greedy - but they didn't. Hell, they absolutely didn't need to release the Titan Xp, but they chose to anyway. Why? To set an expectation for performance from their next generation of cards.
What really creams my corn is when you said that NV is competing with itself. Yeah that's true. Vega is no threat for NV cards. Why is it then NV is about to releasing new Volta either if it's a new architecture or a rebrand? They have the Pascal XP and 1080Ti now. Why this year where market is still fresh with those 2 cards. Don't tell me, like Raevenlord stated, market demands. For business It might be possible but didn't NV also stated that Volta will be for gaming as well? If they release gaming card based on Volta architecture now and scam their own cards that would be foolish. I always say that Vega may be nice performer which makes NV worried. I don't know that for sure but hurrying up like that with all the cards released this year is strange. Especially when you jeopardize your own cards and sales. everybody knows the marketing and you never hurry with any card especially when you have 2 new released few months before.
Unless they release it for business this year only and next year for gaming. Which might be the strategy :) Not sure which market is bigger. regular consumers or business. I think the first one which is mostly gaming.
Volta is a completely new architecture, which is something AMD have not done since the first GCN.We know Nvidia will deliver a (limited) quantity of GV100 based Tesla cards to a data center in Q3, consumer products will be arriving later.
:toast: