Nvidia Volta Reportedly Launching on 12nm This Year

When Nvidia released their long term roadmaps a few years ago, one of the far off products was Volta. Set to come after Maxwell and Pascal, Volta appeared to be set for a late 2017 or early 2018 launch. According to the latest reports though, we may be getting Volta sooner than expected in 2017. Furthermore, it appears that the new architecture will also arrive on the obscure 12nm node.

First off, it’s important to note that Nvidia will be repeating their Pascal strategy with Volta arriving for enterprise first. This means we likely won’t get any GeForce products for about 3-6 months after Volta launches for supercomputers. In the meanwhile, we do have the GTX 1080 Ti which is reportedly launching soon as well as a refresh of the current Pascal GPUs.

In terms of Volta, we don’t have too many details but there are a few tidbits. The big one is that it will use the new TSMC 12nm node. This half-node is meant to bridge the gap between 16nm and 10nm and the company has been working on it for a while. It will be interesting to see if this is the case and what performance gains over 16nm exist. Lastly, Volta is also rumored to support GDDR6 as well which is even faster than GDDR5X.