It’s looking like Nvidia will be turning to the names of famous scientists again when it comes to codenaming its next major microarchitecture. With the likes of Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, and Grace Hopper already celebrated via Nvidia GPU architecture names, the next celebrant in line looks set to be renowned astronomer, Vera Rubin, if leaked information is to be believed.
This architecture wouldn’t be used in gaming GPUs as deployed inside the best graphics cards of the world, but would instead be for AI and data center GPUs. Nonetheless, it’s wonderful to see the company acknowledge the work of a woman that pioneered our understanding of galaxies.
The Rubin name would be applied to the architecture that follows the upcoming Blackwell (named after statistician David Blackwell) lineup of GPUs, which itself follows on from the Hopper architecture that’s named after pioneer of computer programming, Grace Hopper.
The Hopper H100 chip is the one that has been snapped up in vast numbers in recent months, leading to huge financial success for Nvidia, with it seeing 279% year-on-year growth in its AI chip business. As such, the Rubin architecture is not the next one but the one after.
The rumor comes via regular – and regularly right – leaker kopite7kimi, who tweeted “Miss the Golden Age of Exploration” while quote tweeting a mini bio of Vera Rubin. That’s not a lot to go on but the reference was clear.
Currently, very little is known about the power that will contained within the Rubin architecture but we can certainly expect it to be exceedingly capable. The GPU name itself is expected to be R100, following the convention of the letter of GPUs being the first letter of the surname of the architecture codename – Hopper being H100, Ampere A100, etc.
As for gaming GPUs and graphics cards, the next GPU architecture we can expect will be powering the RTX 5000 series is Ada Lovelace-Next. Meanwhile, it will be the RTX 4000 Super series of graphics cards that we next see appearing on shelves, powered by the existing Ada Lovelace architecture used in the likes of the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070.