NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 And GTX 2070 Ampere Graphics Cards Allegedly Launch Next Month At GTC

Word around the water cooler is that NVIDIA is preparing to launch a couple of new graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 2080 and GeForce GTX 2070, during its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) next month. The new cards are said to be based on NVIDIA's upcoming 12-nanometer 'Ampere' architecture, which itself has been the subject of rumors and speculation over the past few weeks.

None of this is confirmed, but if the rumor mill is on point, NVIDIA will skip over Volta for the gaming crowd and introduce Ampere. Volta, as many of you reading this might be aware, debuted around a year ago as the graphics engine driving NVIDIA's Tesla V100 accelerator. The primary markets for Volta was and remains high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), both of which the Tesla V100 serves.

It was always assumed that Volta would eventually trickle into the gaming space. And if were are to further speculate, Ampere could actually be a version of Volta, just without the dedicated Tensor cores that are designed to speed up AI workloads, something gaming cards do not really need. After all, Volta is built on a 12nm FinFET manufacturing process by TSMC, so it's not a stretch that Ampere could be a version of Volta that is optimized for gaming.

The upcoming GeForce GTX 2080 and GeForce GTX 2070 cards are expected to use 16Gbps or 18Gbps GDDR6 memory chips produced by Samsung. It is reasonable to expect performance to be in the neighborhood of NVIDIA's existing GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp cards. With that being the case, NVIDIA might instead choose to call these new cards GeForce GTX 1180 and GeForce GTX 1170.

There has also been chatter of NVIDIA releasing a GPU named Turing, named after Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptanalyst. Speculation is that Turing could power cards designed specifically for cryptocurrency mining.