GTC—To power the next wave of AI data centers, NVIDIA today announced its next-generation accelerated computing platform with NVIDIA Hopper architecture, delivering an order of magnitude performance leap over its predecessor. Named for Grace Hopper, a pioneering U.S. computer scientist, the new architecture succeeds the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, launched two years ago.

The company also announced its first Hopper-based GPU, the NVIDIA H100, packed with 80 billion transistors. The world's largest and most powerful accelerator, the H100 has groundbreaking features such as a revolutionary Transformer Engine and a highly scalable NVIDIA NVLink interconnect for advancing gigantic AI language models, deep recommender systems, genomics and complex digital twins.

The recent NVIDIA data-leak springs up information on various upcoming graphics parts. Besides "Ada Lovelace," "Hopper," we come across a new codename, "Blackwell." It turns out that NVIDIA is splitting the the graphics and compute architecture naming with the next generation, not unlike what AMD did, with its RDNA and CDNA series. The current "Ampere" architecture is being used both for compute and graphics, with the streaming multiprocessor for the two being slightly different—the compute "Ampere" has more FP64 and Tensor components, while the graphics "Ampere" does away with these in favor of RT cores and graphics-relevant components.

The graphics architecture to succeed GeForce "Ampere" will be GeForce "Ada Lovelace." GPUs in this series are identified in the leaked code as "AD102," "AD103," "AD104," "AD106," "AD107," and "AD10B," succeeding a similar numbering for parts with the "A" (GeForce Ampere) series. The compute architecture succeeding "Ampere" will be codenamed "Hopper." with parts in the series being codenamed "GH100" and "GH202." Another compute or datacenter architecture is "Blackwell," with parts being codenamed "GB100" and "GB102." From all accounts, NVIDIA is planning to launch the GeForce 40-series "Ada" graphics card lineup in the second half of 2022. The company is in need of a similar refresh for its compute product lineup, and could debut "Hopper" either toward the end of 2022 or next year. "Blackwell" could follow "Hopper."

Hopper is an upcoming compute architecture from NVIDIA which will be the first from the company to feature a Multi-Chip-Module (MCM) design similar to Intel's Xe-HPC and AMD's upcoming CDNA2. The Hopper architecture has been teased for over 2 years but it would appear that it is nearing completion with a recent leak suggesting the product will tape out soon. This compute GPU will likely be manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm node and could feature two dies each with 288 Streaming Microprocessors which could theoretically provide a three-fold performance improvement over the Ampere-based NVIDIA A100. The first product to feature the GPU is expected to be the NVIDIA H100 data center accelerator which will serve as a successor to the A100 and could potentially launch in mid-2022.