A rumor out of China and confirmation from a regular leaker give us our very first insight into NVIDIA’s next GPUs.
NVIDIA internal GPU codenames typically go something like this: first a G (for „graphics“ or „GeForce“), then the first letter of the architecture name, and then three digits. The first digit indicates the architectural revision, the second digit marks the chip revision, and then the last digit suggests the specific chip’s expected market position, with higher digits applied to lower-end GPUs.
Turing and Ada both skipped the „G“ for using a two-letter architectural indicator (‚TU‘ and ‚AD‘ respectively), but that’s because there were already architectures (Tesla and Ampere) with the same starting letter. The company’s next major GPU architecture is expected to be named after American mathematician David Blackwell, so it’s expected that the new GPUs will be codenamed with „GB“ and then three numbers, as usual.
So, going by historical codenames, we’d normally expect to see GB102, GB104, GB106, and so on. However, according to the latest leak out of China as well as new information from regular NVIDIA leaker kopite7kimi, we won’t be seeing any of those. Instead, NVIDIA’s next-generation graphics architecture is going to start with GB202 and then continue through GB203, GB205, GB206, and finally GB207.
