Is This Image Our First Glimpse of Volta?

We might have our first glimpse at the NVIDIA Volta and my word has it got the community in hysteria. While “wait for Volta” isn’t perhaps trending quite as much as ‘wait for Ryzen’ did, people are eagerly anticipating Nvidia’s new top end card.

What do we know about this NVIDIA Volta?

Following the initial announcement at GTC 2017 which we reported in  our article here. There was the Tesla, which was a so far unreleased prototype.

From from the pictures we have, not a lot. What we can speculate on is the following;

• Black and Gold colour scheme
• Reported 16gb of VRAM
• NVLINK 2.0 is reported to be part of the build.
• Whoever build this system likes Corsair.
• The office carpet is nice.

There is more, but to be frank, we’re so deep into the realms of speculation here I’m only touching on what is either known or reasonably logical. As someone (stupid) once said, we have knowns, known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

How do you know this is legit?

We don’t, and we’re not so gullible to take this at face value. So I’m presuming the inevitable ‘blah blah click-bait article’ comments won’t have bothered reading this far. What we have here is a very tentative and highly dubious image seemingly taken with a potato phone. Having done some digging, I found very little to call this legitimate, but at the same time, didn’t find enough to call this out entirely as being fake.

The source of information is however interesting. An intern at Nvidia has released these images on their Facebook account. Now while this is likely to have them fired by the morning, on the whole, this part of the story does seem to check out.

To pour a bucket of cold water over this story, it could easily just be a modified card, or perhaps even a new card based on the Pascal technology such as the incredible Titan Xp. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time such a fake image has been produced.

In all honestly, both the editor here at eTeknix and I are erring towards this being fake, we just can’t prove it yet. Of course, we want it to be real too. People are so anxious for news that a poor quality image could easily cause a small wildfire. In addition, the intern could very likely be facing serious criminal implications if this is true. If nothing else, I wouldn’t hold out much hope of him getting a job there.