While Nvidia’s Pascal is set to launch next year, the graphics company is already setting it’s sights on their next architecture. Codenamed Volta, the Pascal replacement is set to launch sometime in 2018 for the consumer market. For the much more lucrative supercomputer market though, Nvidia is debuting the architecture one year earlier, in 2017. Volta would mark the sixth unified shader architecture to be released by Nvidia.
Volta was originally meant to used HMC or Hybrid Memory Cube as a GDDR5 replacement. That didn’t pan out as HMC suffered delays. This led to Pascal debuting with HBM, with High Bandwidth Memory as a stand in. HMC is finally showing some progress as Micron finally starts rolling with production. Despite this, supply will still short which is probably why Nvidia is choosing to launch first with supercomputers.
Another reason is Nvidia also wants to milk Pascal as much as possible. If Volta were to launch the same year for consumers as supercomputers, Pascal would only have a very short 1-year cycle, making it hard to recoup R&D costs. With Pascal being the scapegoat as well with HBM, Nvidia should be able to learn some lessons for HMC which is relatively more complex. Volta will also utilize the NVLINK GPU interconnect set to debut with Pascal.
Thank you WCCFTech for providing us with this information
