Friday, November 15th 2019
NVIDIA "Ampere" Successor Reportedly Codenamed "Hopper"
NVIDIA has reportedly codenamed a future GPU architecture "Hopper," in honor of Grace Hopper, an eminent computer scientist who invented one of the first linkers, and programmed the Harvard Mark I computer that aided the American war efforts in World War II. This came to light as Twitter user "@kopite7kimi," who's had a fairly high hit-rate with NVIDIA info tweeted not just the codename, but also a key NVIDIA product design change. The tweets were later deleted, but not before 3DCenter.org reported on them. To begin with, "Hopper" is reportedly succeeding the upcoming "Ampere" architecture slated for the first half of 2020.
"Hopper" is also rumored to introduce MCM (multi-chip module) GPU packages, which are packages with multiple GPU dies. Currently, GPU MCMs are packages that have one GPU die surrounded by memory dies or stacks. This combination of GPU dies could make up "giant cores," at least in the higher end of the performance spectrum. NVIDIA reserves MCMs for only its most expensive Tesla family of compute accelerators, or Quadro professional graphics cards, and seldom offers client-segment GeForce products.
Source:
3DCenter.org
"Hopper" is also rumored to introduce MCM (multi-chip module) GPU packages, which are packages with multiple GPU dies. Currently, GPU MCMs are packages that have one GPU die surrounded by memory dies or stacks. This combination of GPU dies could make up "giant cores," at least in the higher end of the performance spectrum. NVIDIA reserves MCMs for only its most expensive Tesla family of compute accelerators, or Quadro professional graphics cards, and seldom offers client-segment GeForce products.
26 Comments on NVIDIA "Ampere" Successor Reportedly Codenamed "Hopper"
MCM was rumored about Navi too. I'll believe it when I see it.
...But I can see why that might have had all sorts of unintended connotations, which Nvidia wouldn't have wanted (for those who know their Porn history)
We are almost in 2020 and we are still playing with 2016/2017 performances ... (I don't count the 2080Ti, as it has an obscene price tag).
With MCM Nvidia will be able to split CUDA, Tensor and RTX parts.
Of course it may lower their costs (both manufacturing - because of yields - and R&D - because chips can be reused).
It will not lower GPU prices. Product prices are only affected by supply and demand.
Intel's GPU will be MCM from the start.
Not sure about AMD (Navi was expected to be MCM).
Still, we don't have anything solid confirming what "Ampere" is at this point, if it's a gaming architecture, an overarching architecture, a data-center architecture or not real at all.
I would like to remind people that some details reported "everywhere" can still turn out be completely wrong, like AMD Arcturus as a GCN successor, Turing cards being named 11xx or Zen 2 running at 5 GHz… Not quite true. Production and development cost does to some extent impact how low the prices can be pushed, given there is competition in the first place of course.
Prices are driven by supply and demand. That's it. This is not finance and not logistics. It's pure math applied to how people use their resources (which we started to call "economy" few centuries ago).
This is based on just 4 assumptions:
- there's a distribution of how much money buyers can spend,
- there's a limited amount of goods,
- each buyer wants to buy for as little as possible,
- each seller wants to sell for as much as possible.
As you can see, there are no costs in this theorem. :)
Costs can be seen as a sensible lower limit, but they don't impact the price. They only impact profitability. Because a company can (and often does) sell under costs. And it is allowed to do so. But if it does this too often, it's not profitable and collapses.
A company always sells for as much as it can. It will not voluntarily sacrifice earnings. :)
There will always be a threshold where the manufacturer will cross the line of profitability, and will only sell at a loss for specific reasons, such as grabbing market share(for long term profits), marketing reasons (e.g. a big sale), or they offset the costs somehow with additional products or services (bundled or optional upgrades).
A good example is AMD's Vega, even after the HBM supplies were plentiful and the mining craze were long gone, market supplies remained artifically low, simply because it wouldn't be profitable to price them low enough to truly compete with Pascal. And just there you admitted that cost is a factor.
If you know how the stock market works, there is usually both buy and sell options many times larger than the actual traded volume, so the theoretical supply is there, but the supply is always dependent on a minimum price. The same is true for goods and services; the amount of products that Nvidia, AMD or Intel is willing to produce is dependent on the profit they can make from it.
Now let's leave the philosophy at the schools where it belongs, anyone with common sense understands that cost is always a factor.
You can argue that they don't really have the need as they dominate the market but then again Nvidia pioneered raytracing in gaming and dedicated hardware to run it and they had no need to do so either but today that's paying off ( considering the strategic advantage they have on this field over the competition ) , so same can happen with MCM .
Don't get me wrong i don't see them pulling an MCM based gaming GPU in 2021 but 2022 there are big chances of that happening . Ultimately it will depend on the degree of competition they receive from AMD and Intel in 2020 ( or the lack of it ) .
Especially having separate RT chiplet?
If you don't disagree with this then please look at the prices of Intel and AMD now because in your point of view one of the companies is losing money. I bet, just like in other posts, you will say AMD is losing money with Ryzen because price for the product is lower than Intel's is and AMD's CPUs are made of chiplets. Why would AMD do chiplet design since it is so expensive and it is not worth it?
Now look what happened with the market these days after AMD released chiplets and Ryzen. AMD is killing Intel with prices and please don't say AMD Is losing money because it is ridiculous.