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.

NVIDIA today announced its first data center CPU, an Arm-based processor that will deliver 10x the performance of today's fastest servers on the most complex AI and high performance computing workloads.

The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world's most advanced applications—including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing—that analyze enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory. It combines energy-efficient Arm CPU cores with an innovative low-power memory subsystem to deliver high performance with great efficiency.

NVIDIA has launched its GeForce RTX 3000 series of graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture three months ago. However, we are already getting information about the next-generation that the company plans to introduce. In the past, the rumors made us believe that the architecture coming after Ampere is allegedly being called Hopper. Hopper architecture is supposed to bring multi-chip packaging technology and be introduced after Ampere. However, thanks to @kopite7kimi on Twitter, a reliable source of information, we have data that NVIDIA is reportedly working on a monolithic GPU architecture that the company internally refers to as "ADxxx" for its codenames.

The new monolithically-designed Lovelace architecture is going make a debut on the 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, a whole year earlier than Hopper. It is unknown which foundry will manufacture the GPUs, however, both of NVIDIA's partners, TSMC and Samsung, are capable of manufacturing it. The Hopper is expected to arrive sometime in 2023-2024 and utilize the MCM technology, while the Lovelace architecture will appear in 2021-2022. We are not sure if the Hopper architecture will be exclusive to data centers or extend to the gaming segment as well. The Ada Lovelace architecture is supposedly going to be a gaming GPU family. Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, has appeared on NVIDIA's 2018 GTC t-shirt known as "Company of Heroes", so NVIDIA may have already been using the ADxxx codenames internally for a long time now.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in a pre-GTC press briefing stressed that the upcoming "Ampere" graphics architecture will spread across both the company's compute-accelerator and commercial graphics product lines. The architecture makes its debut later today with the Tesla A100 HPC processor for breakthrough AI acceleration. It's unlikely that any GeForce products will be formally announced this month, with rumors pointing to a GeForce "Ampere" product launch at a gaming-focused event in September, close to "Cyberpunk 2077" launch.

It was earlier believed that NVIDIA had forked its breadwinning IP into two lines, one focused on headless scalar compute, and the other on graphics products through the company's GeForce and Quadro product lines. To that effect, its "Volta" architecture focused on scalar-compute (with the exception of the forgotten TITAN V); and the "Turing" architecture focused solely on GeForce and Quadro. It was then believed that "Ampere" will focus on compute, and the so-called "Hopper" would be this generation's graphics-focused architecture. We now know that won't be the case. We've compiled a selection of GeForce Ampere rumors in this article.

TSMC is working hard to bring a new 5 nm (N5 and N5+) despite all the hiccups the company may have had due to the COVID-19 pandemic happening. However, it seems like nothing can stop TSMC, and plenty of companies have already reserved some capacity for their chips. With mass production supposed to start in Q3 of this year, 5 nm node should become one of the major nodes over time for TSMC, with predictions that it will account for 10% of all capacity for 2020. Thanks to the report of ChinaTimes, we have a list of new clients for the TSMC 5 nm node, with some very interesting names like Intel appearing on the list.

Apple and Huawei/HiSilicon will be the biggest customers for the node this year with A14 and Kirin 1000 chips being made for N5 node, with Apple ordering the A15 chips and Huawei readying the Kirin 1100 5G chip for the next generation N5+. From there, AMD will join the 5 nm party for Zen 4 processors and RDNA 3 graphics cards. NVIDIA has also reserved some capacity for its Hopper architecture, which is expected to be a consumer-oriented option, unlike Ampere. And perhaps the most interesting entry to the list is Intel Xe graphics cards. The list shows that Intel might use the N5 process form TSMC so it can ensure the best possible performance for its future cards, in case it has some issues manufacturing its own nodes, just like it did with 10 nm.

In a confirmation that a future NVIDIA graphics architecture will be codenamed "Hopper," the company has trademarked the term with the US-PTO. The trademark application was filed as recently as December 4, and closely follows that of "Aerial," another trademark, which is an SDK for a GPU-accelerated 5G vRANs (virtual radio-access networks). Named after eminent computing scientist Grace Hopper, the new graphics architecture by NVIDIA reportedly sees one of the first GPU die MCMs (package with multiple GPU dies). It reportedly succeeds "Ampere," NVIDIA's next graphics architecture.

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.