A report on German IT site, Heise, is suggesting the architecture set to follow the Nvidia Volta GPUs will be named Ampere.
What about right now? These are the best graphics cards to buy today.
It’s just a short note at the end of a report on Nvidia’s profits, offering no sources to back up the touted architecture nomenclature, stating that “information on the upcoming GPU generation, which should appear under the name ‘Ampere’, should be at the GPU Technology Conference 2018.”
The suggested title makes sense with Nvidia historically naming their GPU generations after prominent scientists, and following Alessandro Volta with Andre-Marie Ampere works given their electrical heritage.
Some sites are suggesting that the Ampere generation will appear next year, usurping Volta and becoming the next consumer range of graphics cards to follow Pascal. That seems like a bit of a rush, with it being more likely the Ampere GPUs will purely be announced next year as part of a revised roadmap that Jen-Hsun will share at either the GPU Technology Conference in March or CES in January.
Nvidia have come to the end of their publicly announced GPU generations with Volta, and given that they create their roadmaps covering the next five years, and it takes three years to build a new generation of chips, it would make sense for them to come clean in 2018 about the architecture they’re working on at the moment.
There is the slight possibility Nvidia have decided their Volta GPU design is too heavily weighted towards AI for it to make a decent consumer graphics card, and that they need something else to fill that gap, but that seems incredibly unlikely. If the Nvidia Ampere name is for reals then it’s more likely this is the next next-gen GPU of our green team dreams.