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Nvidia’s rumored 7nm Ampere graphics could debut next week, but not for gamers

Chuong Nguyen
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Nvidia could reportedly match rival AMD by announcing its own graphics processing unit based on a next-generation 7nm manufacturing process as early as next week at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The 7nm architecture, code-named Ampere, follows Nvidia’s highly publicized Turing launch last year, which was based on a 12nm manufacturing process. While news of a 7nm GPU from Nvidia may be exciting, the new architecture might not arrive on a consumer card for a while, so gamers may not be able to immediately benefit from the technology.

“I don’t think we’ll see an Ampere-based gaming card released, but rather a new GPU architecture tease that will succeed Volta in the HPC/DL/A.I. market,” publication Tweak Town reported. “Turing makes great use of GDDR6 memory technology, and Ampere could continue this with all of the things NVIDIA learned from the Turing release it can make into an even better GPU on 7nm.”

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The publication originally suggested that Nvidia could follow the launch of Turing, which the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 series cards are based on, with the launch of Ampere in the future, but Nvidia’s timeline for its 7nm chipset may have been pushed forward given rival AMD’s announcement. To corroborate a potential launch at GTC next week, Wccftech reported that Nvidia’s yields with its 7nm chips have been improving, citing reports from reliable sources, and if Nvidia could ramp up volume production, then an announcement could happen soon. It’s unclear if Nvidia will be ready to demo the powers of a 7nm GPU at the technology show, the company could use the venue to talk about the merits of moving from the current 12nm architecture to 7nm. AMD had beat Nvidia to the punch in January by announcing its Radeon Vega VII GPU at the Consumer Electronics Show and Wccftech speculated that AMD could announce its next-generation 7nm Navi GPU later this year.

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In addition to AMD and Nvidia, the battle for better computing graphics technology will be heating up in the near future. Intel is believed to announce its own discrete GPU later this year. The company promised that an official launch could happen as early as 2020.

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Chuong Nguyen
Chuong Nguyen
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
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