Yesterday, NVIDIA launched its GeForce RTX 40-series, based on the "Ada" graphics architecture. We're yet to receive a technical briefing about the architecture itself, and the various hardware components that make up the silicon; but NVIDIA on its website gave us a first look at what's in store with the key number-crunching components of "Ada," namely the Ada CUDA core, 4th generation Tensor core, and 3rd generation RT core. Besides generational IPC and clock speed improvements, the latest CUDA core benefits from SER (shader execution reordering), an SM or GPC-level feature that reorders execution waves/threads to optimally load each CUDA core and improve parallelism.

Despite using specialized hardware such as the RT cores, the ray tracing pipeline still relies on CUDA cores and the CPU for a handful tasks, and here NVIDIA claims that SER contributes to a 3X ray tracing performance uplift (the performance contribution of CUDA cores). With traditional raster graphics, SER contributes a meaty 25% performance uplift. With Ada, NVIDIA is introducing its 4th generation of Tensor core (after Volta, Turing, and Ampere). The Tensor cores deployed on Ada are functionally identical to the ones on the Hopper H100 Tensor Core HPC processor, featuring the new FP8 Transformer Engine, which delivers up to 5X the AI inference performance over the previous generation Ampere Tensor Core (which itself delivered a similar leap by leveraging sparsity).

The Alphacool Eisblock Aurora acrylic GPX water cooler with backplate is now also available for MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X graphics cards.

More performance! Voltage converters and V-RAM is now cooled much better and more effectively with liquid cooling. This is due to the components being brought closer to the cooler through the use of thinner, yet more powerful Thermal pads. The reduction of the thickness of the nickel-plated copper block to 5.5mm and the constant optimisation of the water flow within the heat sink promise a significant increase in performance. In addition to performance, design also plays an important role. The addressable digital RGB LEDs are embedded directly in the cooling block and give the cooler its very own visual touch.

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.

According to the report of DigiTimes, which talked about TSMC's 5 nm silicon manufacturing node, they have reported that NVIDIA is also going to be a customer for it and they could use it in the near future. And that is very interesting information, knowing that these chips will not go in the next generation of GPUs. Why is that? Because we know that NVIDIA will utilize both TSMC and Samsung for their 7 nm manufacturing nodes for its next-generation Ampere GPUs that will end up in designs like GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 graphics cards. These designs are not what NVIDIA needs 5 nm for.

Being that NVIDIA already has a product in its pipeline that will satisfy the demand for the high-performance graphics market, maybe they are planning something that will end up being a surprise to everyone. No one knows what it is, however, the speculation (which you should take with a huge grain of salt) would be that NVIDIA is updating its Tegra SoC with the latest node. That Tegra SoC could be used in a range of mobile devices, like the Nintendo Switch, so could NVIDIA be preparing a new chip for Nintendo Switch 2?

AMD has scored yet another design win for usage of its high-performance EPYC processors in the Cray Shasta supercomputer. The Cray Shasta will be deployed in the US Navy's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) as part of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The peak theoretical computing capability of 12.8 PetaFLOPS, or 12.8 quadrillion floating point operations per second supercomputer will be built with 290,304 AMD EPYC (Rome) processor cores and 112 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). The system will also feature 590 total terabytes (TB) of memory and 14 petabytes (PB) of usable storage, including 1 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage. Cray's Slingshot network will make sure all those components talk to each other at a rate of 200 Gigabits per second.

Navy DSRC supercomputers support climate, weather, and ocean modeling by NMOC, which assists U.S. Navy meteorologists and oceanographers in predicting environmental conditions that may affect the Navy fleet. Among other scientific endeavors, the new supercomputer will be used to enhance weather forecasting models; ultimately, this improves the accuracy of hurricane intensity and track forecasts. The system is expected to be online by early fiscal year 2021.

NVIDIA today introduced Jetson Xavier NX, the world's smallest, most powerful AI supercomputer for robotic and embedded computing devices at the edge. With a compact form factor smaller than the size of a credit card, the energy-efficient Jetson Xavier NX module delivers server-class performance up to 21 TOPS for running modern AI workloads, and consumes as little as 10 watts of power.

Jetson Xavier NX opens the door for embedded edge computing devices that demand increased performance but are constrained by size, weight, power budgets or cost. These include small commercial robots, drones, intelligent high-resolution sensors for factory logistics and production lines, optical inspection, network video recorders, portable medical devices and other industrial IoT systems.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 has a significantly watered down multimedia feature-set compared to the other GeForce GTX 16-series GPUs. The card was launched this Tuesday (23 April) without any meaningful technical documentation for reviewers, which caused many, including us, to assume that NVIDIA carried over the "Turing" NVENC encoder, giving you a feature-rich HTPC or streaming card at $150. Apparently that is not the case. According to full specifications put out by NVIDIA on its website product-page that went up hours after product launch, the GTX 1650 (and the TU117 silicon) features a multimedia engine that's been carried over from the older "Volta" architecture.

Turing's NVENC is known to have around 15 percent performance uplift over Volta's, which means the GTX 1650 will have worse game livestreaming performance than expected. The GTX 1650 has sufficient muscle for playing e-Sports titles such as PUBG at 1080p, and with an up-to-date accelerated encoder, would have pulled droves of more amateur streamers to the mainstream on Twitch and YouTube Gaming. Alas, the $220 GTX 1660 would be your ticket to that.

NVIDIA will kick off the 2019 GPU Technology Conference later today, at 2 PM Pacific time. The company is expected to either tease or unveil a new graphics architecture succeeding "Volta" and "Turing." Not much is known about this architecture, but it's highly likely to be NVIDIA's first to be designed for the 7 nm silicon fabrication process. This unveiling could be the earliest stage of the architecture's launch cycle, would could see market availability only by late-2019 or mid-2020, if not later, given that the company's RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series have only been unveiled recently. NVIDIA could leverage 7 nm to increase transistor densities, and bring its RTX technology to even more affordable price-points.

In Win today introduced the modestly named Classic Basic (CB) series high-Wattage PSUs. These are high-end PSUs with premium specifications, whose naming probably reflects the classic product design. Available in 1050W and 1200W models, the CB series PSUs offer fully modular flat cabling, DC-to-DC switching for the +3.3V and +5V rails, and a single +12V rail design, boasting of 80 Plus Platinum efficiency. The 135 mm temperature-activated fan stays off when either the PSU's load is under 25%, or an internal thermal diode reads under 55°C. It only starts spinning beyond, with a gradual curve. The fan spins for 60 seconds following system shutdown.

Under the hood, the CB-series features a Digital Voltage Feedback design that minimizes output voltage fluctuation to under ±2%; an active PFC, and electrical protections against over/under-voltage, overload, overheat, and short-circuit. Both models offer two 8-pin EPS connectors besides the 24-pin ATX. The 1200W model offers eight 6+2 pin PCIe power connectors, while the 1050W model offers six. Both models offer 16 SATA power, and a number of other legacy power connectors. Both models are backed by 7-year warranties.

Later today (20th August), NVIDIA will formally unveil its GeForce RTX 2000 series consumer graphics cards. This marks a major change in the brand name, triggered with the introduction of the new RT Cores, specialized components that accelerate real-time ray-tracing, a task too taxing on conventional CUDA cores. Ray-tracing and DNN acceleration requires SIMD components to crunch 4x4x4 matrix multiplication, which is what RT cores (and tensor cores) specialize at. The chips still have CUDA cores for everything else. This generation also debuts the new GDDR6 memory standard, although unlike GeForce "Pascal," the new GeForce "Turing" won't see a doubling in memory sizes.

NVIDIA is expected to debut the generation with the new GeForce RTX 2080 later today, with market availability by end of Month. Going by older rumors, the company could launch the lower RTX 2070 and higher RTX 2080+ by late-September, and the mid-range RTX 2060 series in October. Apparently the high-end RTX 2080 Ti could come out sooner than expected, given that VideoCardz already has some of its specifications in hand. Not a lot is known about how "Turing" compares with "Volta" in performance, but given that the TITAN V comes with tensor cores that can [in theory] be re-purposed as RT cores; it could continue on as NVIDIA's halo SKU for the client-segment.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the second quarter ended July 29, 2018, of $3.12 billion, up 40 percent from $2.23 billion a year earlier, and down 3 percent from $3.21 billion in the previous quarter.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.76, up 91 percent from $0.92 a year ago and down 11 percent from $1.98 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.94, up 92 percent from $1.01 a year earlier and down 5 percent from $2.05 in the previous quarter.

"Growth across every platform - AI, Gaming, Professional Visualization, self-driving cars - drove another great quarter," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Fueling our growth is the widening gap between demand for computing across every industry and the limits reached by traditional computing. Developers are jumping on the GPU-accelerated computing model that we pioneered for the boost they need.

There's just no quieting the rumor mill. It's like we're walking through a field that's made entirely of small pieces of stone that we inadvertently kick - and under every stone, another tidbit, another speculation, another pointer - a veritable breadcrumb trail that's getting more and more convoluted. Even as we were getting sort of decided in regards to NVIDIA's next-generation hardware and its nomenclature and model number - 1100 series - we now have two distinct sources and reports popping one right after the other that point to a 2000 series - and that also suggests Ampere might be in the cards for the next-gen product after all.

We've previously touched upon whether or not NVIDIA should launch their 1100 or 2000 series of graphics cards ahead of any new product from AMD. At the time, I wrote that I only saw benefits to that approach: earlier time to market -> satisfaction of upgrade itches and entrenchment as the only latest-gen manufacturer -> raised costs over lack of competition -> ability to respond by lowering prices after achieving a war-chest of profits. However, reports of a costly NVIDIA mistake in overestimating demand for its Pascal GPUs does lend some other shades to the whole equation.

Write-offs in inventory are costly (just ask Microsoft), and apparently, NVIDIA has found itself in a miscalculating demeanor: overestimating gamers' and miners' demand for their graphics cards. When it comes to gamers, NVIDIA's Pascal graphics cards have been available in the market for two years now - it's relatively safe to say that the majority of gamers who needed higher-performance graphics cards have already taken the plunge. As to miners, the cryptocurrency market contraction (and other factors) has led to a taper-out of graphics card demand for this particular workload. The result? NVIDIA's demand overestimation has led, according to Seeking Alpha, to a "top three" Taiwan OEM returning 300,000 GPUs to NVIDIA, and "aggressively" increased GDDR5 buying orders from the company, suggesting an excess stock of GPUs that need to be made into boards.

Even as NVIDIA's next-generation computer graphics architecture for mainstream users remains an elusive unicorn, speculation and tendrils of smokehave kept the community in a somewhat tight edge when it comes to the how and when of its features and introduction. NVIDIA may have launched another architecture since its current consumer-level Pascal in Volta, but that one has been reserved to professional, computing-intensive scenarios. Speculation is rife on NVIDIA's next-generation architecture, and the posted program for the Hot Chips Symposium could be the light at the end of the tunnel for a new breath of life into the graphics card market.

Looking at the Hot Chips' Symposium program, the detailed section for the first day of the conference, in August 20th, lists a talk by NVIDIA's Stuart Oberman, titled "NVIDIA's Next Generation Mainstream GPU". This likely means exactly as it reads, and is an introduction to NVIDIA's next-generation computing solution under its gaming GeForce brand - or it could be an announcement, though a Hot Chips Symposium for that seems slightly off the mark. You can check the symposium's schedule on the source link - there are some interesting subjects there, such as Intel's "High Performance Graphics solutions in thin and light mobile form factors" - which could see talks of the Intel-AMD collaboration in Kaby Lake G, and possibly of the work being done on Intel's in-house high-performance graphics technologies (with many of AMD's own RTG veterans, of course).

NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX graphics cards based on the "Volta" architecture, could feature GDDR6 memory, according to a supply deal SK Hynix struck with NVIDIA, resulting in the Korean memory manufacturer's stock price surging by 6 percent. It's not known if GDDR6 will be deployed on all SKUs, or if like GDDR5X, it will be exclusive to a handful high-end SKUs. The latest version of SK Hynix memory catalogue points to an 8 Gb (1 GB) GDDR6 memory chip supporting speeds of up to 14 Gbps at 1.35V, and up to 12 Gbps at 1.25V.

Considering NVIDIA already got GDDR5X to run at 11 Gbps, it could choose the faster option. Memory remains a cause for concern. If 8 Gb is the densest chip from SK Hynix, then the fabled "GV104" (GP104-successor), which could likely feature a 256-bit wide memory interface, will only feature up to 8 GB of memory, precluding the unlikely (and costly) option of piggy-backing chips to achieve 16 GB.

NVIDIA is reportedly giving finishing touches to its first serious GeForce-branded GPU based on a next-generation NVIDIA architecture (nobody knows which), for a late-July product announcement. This involves a limited reference-design "Founders Edition" product launch in July, followed by custom-design graphics card launches in August and September. This chip could be the second-largest client-segment implementation of said architecture succeeding the GP104, which powers the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.

It's growing increasingly clear that the first product could be codenamed "Turing" after all, and that "Turing" may not be the codename of an architecture or a silicon, but rather an SKU (likely either named GTX 1180 or GTX 2080). As with all previous NVIDIA product-stack roll-outs since the GTX 680, NVIDIA will position the GTX 1080-successor as a high-end product initially, as it will be faster than the GTX 1080 Ti, but the product will later play second-fiddle to a GTX 1080 Ti-successor based on a bigger chip.

An official Gigabyte UK Notebook representative, who goes by the name of Atom80, over at the OverclockersUK forums has confirmed that NVIDIA's next-generation mobile GPUs will launch towards the end of this year. When asked about whether Gigabyte will be providing a GTX 1080 option for their Aero 15X V8-CF1 notebook, Atom80 stated that there are no plans to upgrade the Aorus notebook family until the next-generation GPUs are available. Since the mobile variants usually launch a few months after the desktop variants, it's possible that we're looking at a summer launch for the desktop models.

Microsoft today announced an extension to its DirectX 12 API with DirectX Raytracing, which provides components designed to make real-time ray-tracing easier to implement, and uses Compute Shaders under the hood, for wide graphics card compatibility. NVIDIA feels that their "Volta" graphics architecture, has enough computational power on tap, to make real-time ray-tracing available to the masses. The company has hence collaborated with Microsoft to develop the NVIDIA RTX technology, as an interoperative part of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, along with a few turnkey effects, which will be made available through the company's next-generation GameWorks SDK program, under GameWorks Ray Tracing, as a ray-tracing denoiser module for the API.

Real-time ray-tracing has for long been regarded as a silver-bullet to get lifelike lighting, reflections, and shadows right. Ray-tracing is already big in the real-estate industry, for showcasing photorealistic interactive renderings of property under development, but has stayed away from gaming, that tends to be more intense, with larger scenes, more objects, and rapid camera movements. Movies with big production budgets use pre-rendered ray-tracing farms to render each frame. Movies have, hence, used ray-traced visual-effects for years now, since it's not interactive content, and its studios are willing to spend vast amounts of time and money to painstakingly render each frame using hundreds of rays per pixel.

It's being reported by Tom's Hardware, citing industry sources, that NVIDIA isn't looking to expand upon its graphics cards lineup at this years' GDC (Game Developers Conference) or GTC (GPU Technology Conference). Even as reports have been hitting the streets that pointed towards NVIDIA announcing (if not launching) their two new product architectures as early as next month, it now seems that won't be the case after all. As a reminder, the architectures we're writing about here are Turing, reportedly for crypto-mining applications, and Ampere, the expected GeForce architecture leapfrogging the current top of the line - and absent from regular consumer shores - Volta.

There's really not much that can be gleaned as of now from industry sources, though. It's clear no one has received any kind of information from NVIDIA when it comes to either of their expected architectures, which means an impending announcement isn't likely. At the same time, NVIDIA really has no interest in pulling the trigger on new products - demand is fine, and competition from AMD is low. As such, reports of a June or later announcement/release are outstandingly credible, as are reports that NVIDIA would put the brakes on a consumer version of Ampere, use it to replace Volta on the professional and server segment, and instead launch Volta - finally - on the consumer segment. This would allow the company to cache in on their Volta architecture, this time on consumer products, for a full generation longer, while innovating the market - of sorts. All scenarios are open right now; but one thing that seems clear is that there will be no announcements next month.

NVIDIA prepares to make its annual tech expo, the 2018 Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) action-packed. The company already surprised us with its next-generation "Volta" architecture based TITAN V graphics card priced at 3 grand; and is working to cash in on the crypto-currency wave and ease pressure on consumer graphics card inventories by designing highly optimized mining accelerators under the new Turing brand. There's now talk that NVIDIA could pole-vault launch of the "Volta" architecture for the consumer-space; by unveiling a GeForce graphics card based on its succeeding architecture, "Ampere."

The oldest reports of NVIDIA unveiling "Ampere" date back to November 2017. At the time it was expected that NVIDIA will only share some PR blurbs on some of the key features it brings to the table, or at best, unveil a specialized (non-gaming) silicon, such as a Drive or machine-learning chip. An Expreview report points at the possibility of a GeForce product, one that you can buy in your friendly neighborhood PC store and play games with. The "Ampere" based GPU will still be based on the 12 nanometer silicon fabrication process at TSMC, and is unlikely to be a big halo chip with exotic HBM stacks. Why NVIDIA chose to leapfrog is uncertain. GTC gets underway late-March.

EK Water Blocks, the Slovenia-based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is releasing water blocks for the most powerful PC GPU on the market to this day, the NVIDIA Titan V. The EK-FC Titan V full cover GPU water block will help you enjoy the full computing power of the Volta architecture based NVIDIA Titan V in a silent environment.

This water block directly cools the GPU, HBM2 memory, and VRM (voltage regulation module) as well! Water is channeled directly over these critical areas, thus allowing the graphics card and it's VRM to remain stable under high overclocks and to reach full boost clocks. EK-FC Titan V water block features a central inlet split-flow cooling engine design for best possible cooling performance, which also works flawlessly with reversed water flow without adversely affecting the cooling performance. Moreover, such design offers great hydraulic performance allowing this product to be used in liquid cooling systems using weaker water pumps.

When Reuters reported Turing as NVIDIA's next gaming graphics card, we knew something was off about it. Something like that would break many of NVIDIA's naming conventions. It now turns out that Turing, named after British scientist Alan Turing, who is credited with leading a team of mathematicians that broke the Nazi "Enigma" cryptography, is a crypto-mining and blockchain compute accelerator. It is being designed to be compact, efficient, and ready for large-scale deployment by amateur miners and crypto-mining firms alike, in a quasi-industrial scale.

NVIDIA Turing could be manufactured at a low-enough cost against GeForce-branded products, and in high-enough scales, to help bring down their prices, and save the PC gaming ecosystem. It could have an ASIC-like disruptive impact on the graphics card market, which could make mining with graphics cards less viable, in turn, lowering graphics card prices. With performance-segment and high-end graphics cards seeing 200-400% price inflation in the wake of crypto-currency mining wave, PC gaming is threatened as gamers are lured to the still-affordable new-generation console ecosystems, led by premium consoles such as the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. There's no word on which GPU architecture Turing will be based on ("Pascal" or "Volta"). NVIDIA is expected to launch its entire family of next-generation GeForce GTX 2000-series "Volta" graphics cards in 2018.

As someone who does not mine crypto-currency, loves fast computers, and gaming on them, I find the current crypto-currency mining craze using graphics cards nothing short of a plague. It's like war broke out, and your government took away all the things you love from the market. All difficult times teach valuable lessons, and in this case, it is "Save up and build future-proof."

When NVIDIA launched its "Pascal" GPU architecture way back in Summer 2016, and AMD followed up, as a user of 2x GeForce GTX 970 SLI, I did not feel the need to upgrade anything, and planned to skip the Pascal/Polaris/Vega generation, and only upgrade when "Volta" or "Navi" offered something interesting. My pair of GTX 970 cards are backed by a Core i7-4770K processor, and 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory, both of which were considered high-end when I bought them, around 2014-15.

Throughout 2016, my GTX 970 pair ate AAA titles for breakfast. With NVIDIA investing on advancing SLI with the new SLI-HB, and DirectX 12 promising a mixed multi-GPU utopia, I had calculated a rather rosy future for my cards (at least to the point where NVIDIA would keep adding SLI profiles for newer games for my cards to chew through). What I didn't see coming was the inflection point between the decline of multi-GPU and crypto-plague eating away availability of high-end graphics cards at sane prices. That is where we are today.

NVIDIA could be giving final touches to its Quadro GV100 "Volta" professional graphics card, after the surprise late-2017 launch of the NVIDIA TITAN V. The card was found listed in the binary view of the latest version of NVFlash (v5.427.0), the most popular NVIDIA graphics card BIOS extraction and flashing utility. Since its feature-set upgrade to the TITAN Xp through newer drivers, NVIDIA has given the TITAN family of graphics cards a quasi-professional differentiation from its GeForce GTX family.

The Quadro family still has the most professional features, software certifications, and are sought after by big companies into graphics design, media, animation, architecture, resource exploration, etc. The Quadro GV100 could hence yet be more feature-rich than the TITAN V. With its GV100 silicon, NVIDIA is using a common ASIC and board design for its Tesla V100 PCIe add-in card variants, the TITAN V, and the Quadro GV100. While the company endowed the TITAN V with 12 GB of HBM2 memory using 3 out of 4 memory stacks the ASIC is capable of holding; there's an opportunity for NVIDIA to differentiate the Quadro GV100 by giving it that 4th memory stack, and 16 GB of total memory. You can download the latest version of NVFlash here.

NVIDIA pulled a rabbit out of its proverbial hat late last week, with the surprise announcement of the gaming-worthy Volta-based Titan V graphics card. The Titan V is another one in a flurry of Titan cards from NVIDIA as of late, and while the healthiness of NVIDIA's nomenclature scheme can be put to the sword, the Titan V's performance really can't.

In the Unigine Superposition benchmark, the $3000 Titan V managed to deliver 5,222 points in the 8K Optimized preset, and 9,431 points on the 1080p Extreme preset. Compare that to an extremely overclocked GTX 1080 Ti running at 2,581 MHz under liquid nitrogen, which hit 8,642 points in the 1080p Extreme preset, and the raw power of NVIDIA's Volta hardware is easily identified. An average 126 FPS is also delivered by the Titan V in the Unigine Heaven benchmark, at 1440p as well. Under gaming workloads, the Titan V is reported to achieve from between 26% and 87% improvements in raw performance, which isn't too shabby, now is it?