Nvidia revealed its next-gen Ampere graphics architecture on Thursday in the form of the A100 data center GPU. PC gamers can glean a lot about future GeForce graphics cards from the announcement.
But that doesn’t mean we humble PC gamers can’t glean information from Ampere’s AI-centric reveal. Here are five key things that Nvidia’s Ampere architecture mean for the next-gen GeForce lineup.
In a prebriefing with business reporters, Huang said that Ampere will streamline the Nvidia GPU lineup, replacing both the data center-centric Volta GPUs as well as the Turing-based GeForce RTX 20-series. The hardware inside each specific GPU will be tailored to the market it’s targeting, though. “There’s great overlap in the architecture, but not in the configuration,” Marketwatch reports Huang as saying when asked about how the consumer and workstation GPUs will compare.
As widely expected, Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs are built using the 7nm manufacturing process, moving forward from the 12nm process used for Turing and Volta. It’s a big deal.
The Ampere GPU at the heart of the A100 is called GA100, a teaser video released by Nvidia shows.
In other words, history says we should expect wonderful advancements from Ampere-based GeForce GPUs.
The move to smaller transistors also means you can squeeze more cores into the same space. Whereas the Volta flagship, the Tesla V100, deployed 21.1 billion transistors,5,120 CUDA cores, and 80 streaming multiprocessor clusters into its 815 mm^2 die, the new Ampere-based A100 crams 54 billion transistors,6,912 CUDA cores, and 108 SMs into its 826 mm^2 die.
