Rumor: Nvidia’s upcoming GPU generation is called ‘Ampere’

Nvidia will present the next GPU generation under the name Ampere at its GPU Technology Conference 2018, which will take place at the end of March 2018. At least that’s what the German site Heise reports. Nvidia itself has not yet revealed the name.

Heise mentions the name ‘Ampere’ in a footnote to his message on Nvidia’s quarterly results. The German site has a relatively good reputation when it comes to rumours. The site has no further details about the video chip. The GPU Technology Conference will take place from March 26 to 29.

The successor to the current Pascal GPU, which Nvidia uses for current GeForce cards, is Volta. Nvidia presented it during the GPU Technology Conference 2017. Volta, however, already appeared on the roadmap in 2013. Nvidia hasn’t shown an updated roadmap since then. Nvidia currently only uses Volta for its Tesla V100 accelerator for gpgpu applications such as deep learning.

In the last few generations, the GeForce products came after the Tesla accelerators, as a variant of the full GPU. For example, the GTX 1080 Ti has the GP102 and the 1080 the GP104, while the Tesla P100 has a GP100 GPU. That will allow Volta-based GeForce cards to appear next year, while a new Tesla accelerator for high performance computing will be Ampere-based.