NVIDIA this morning has made an unexpected news drop with the announcement of a trio of new GeForce laptop GPUs. Joining the GeForce family next …
NVIDIA this morning has made an unexpected news drop with the announcement of a trio of new GeForce laptop GPUs. Joining the GeForce family next year will be a new RTX 2000 series configuration, the GeForce RTX 2050, as well as an update to the MX lineup with the addition of the GeForce MX550 and GeForce MX570. The combination of parts effectively provide a refresh to the low-end/entry-level segment of NVIDIA’s laptop product stack, overhauling these products in time for new laptops to be released next year. While the announcement of these parts makes sense in context, the timing of this announcement is a bit odd, to say the least. NVIDIA is dropping this news not only on a Friday (a day normally reserved for bad news), but the last working Friday of the year at that – most of the tech industry has the remaining two Fridays off. So make of that what you will. Still, with CES 2022 starting bright and early on January 3 rd,2022, there’s little time left to announce anything that won’t be announced at the show itself or needs to be announced ahead of it. So it looks like NVIDIA is laying the groundwork for some partner laptop announcements next month, as OEMs will want new(er) laptop video card SKUs to pair with the new laptop CPUs that we’re expecting to come out in the first part of 2022. More curious, perhaps, is that NVIDIA’s announcement today is for laptop parts that the company doesn’t expect to hit retail shelves until the Spring of 2022. It’s not unusual for OEM parts such as laptop GPUs to be announced a fair bit in advance, since laptops themselves tend to get announced ahead of time. However as it’s still (barely) Fall – we haven’t even reached Winter yet – Spring of 2022 is still over 3 months off, so NVIDIA is announcing these low-end parts well in advance of when they’re expected to reach consumer hands. We’ll see how things play out at CES, but this may be a sign that the industry is going to jump the gun a bit and use the show to announce laptops that won’t be available until a few months later (CES is a fixed point in time; hardware dev cycles aren’t). Diving into the hardware itself, let’s start with the GeForce RTX 2050. The fastest of the new laptop accelerators announced today, it’s also the most curious, for two reasons. First and foremost, this is the second time this month that NVIDIA has issued a new GeForce RTX 2000 series SKU, following the 12GB desktop RTX 2060 last week. Secondly, this is a very odd configuration, as it’s fully RTX-enabled, RT cores and all; but NVIDIA never produced a low-end Turing TU10x chip with those features. At this point we believe RTX 2050 to be based on TU106, given the feature set and RTX 2000 series branding. From a high-level perspective, NVIDIA is clearly doing the tech industry equivalent of rummaging through the pantry and cooking up whatever is left over. The chip crunch means that NVIDIA is already producing every Ampere (GA10x) chip they can on Samsung’s 8nm process, so they are completely capacity constrained there. However Turing TU10x is made on TSMC’s now quite dated 12nm process (a 16nm variation), and apparently NVIDIA still has some left over capacity there. So in order to fulfill some of the remaining demand for GPUs, Turing is officially back on the menu. Overall, it’s not unusual for NVIDIA to cycle through stocks of old chips as one-off variations of existing SKUs (e.g. RTX 2060 with TU104), but it’s certainly a good deal off the beaten path for them to create new SKUs almost three and a half years in.
