Over the last year, we’ve been steadily hearing news and leaks for the upcoming Ampere GPU. While previous leaks have pointed towards a rough March 2020 release date for these GPUs, a recent comment from Nvidia’s CEO looks to finally confirm this. We hope.
Could We See Nvidia Ampere GPUs Launch At GTC 2020?
We don’t see too much of Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang these days but in a recent quarterly earnings conference he made the time to personally invite everyone to the GTC 2020 event in San Jose. Best of all, he closed off his invite with a new little teaser of “You won’t be disappointed”.
This should hopefully mean we see some new releases from Nvidia at GTC or even just some solid information or announcements of things to come.
The News So Far
While we previously heard that Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs passed their EEC certification, we haven’t heard a lot since. We know that Ampere is sure to be an upgrade and that we’ll (hopefully) see it in March.
With Nvidia still improving its RTX performance, we’re likely to see these improvements in the new GPUs, especially when it comes down to ray tracing. Currently, the Turing GPU can handle ray tracing at 1080p at 30 FPS as long as the workload is generally light.
The new Ampere GPUs will also be based on Samsung’s 7nm EUV process which should give a boost to both performance and power efficiency. This does mean that NVIDIA is moving away from TSMC for reasons not yet known. This could be due to a better financial offer on Samsung’s part or maybe even that Samsung’s 7nm tech performs better.
With TSMC currently supplying to the likes of Apple and AMD, the switch to Samsung could merely be for capacity reasons. It’s likely this new release will come with the need for a lot of units which could come with delays if TSMC is at capacity.
Final Word
We’ll make sure to keep our eyes and ears open for any more news on the upcoming Nvidia Ampere GPUs during the wait for GTC 2020. It’s likely we will hear some news during that event though so be sure to check back here for updates. We’ll post them as soon as we have them.