On May 10, NVIDIA launched its Volta line, which, the company claims, is the "world's most powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) computing architecture."
According to NVIDIA's press release, the GPU will carry 21 billion transistors, which is equivalent to 100 central processing units (CPUs) in terms of power. It comes with Tensor Cores to speed up the workloads, which are paired with CUDA cores to create a powerful, unified architecture, which the company claims can replace "hundreds of commodity CPUs."
NVIDIA has also collaborated with Samsung to develop 900 GBps HBM2 dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which allows the device to have 50 percent more memory bandwidth compared to older GPUs. It also offers high-speed interconnect linking GPUs, as well as GPUs to CPUs, via its NVLink technology.
The press release also states that Volta is five times more powerful than Pascal, which is the latest NVIDIA GPU available in the market. The announcement also indicates that the new GPU architecture is 15 times more powerful than Maxwell, which came out two years ago.
Volta is the seventh-generation GPU developed by NVIDIA. According to the company, it will become "the new standard for high performance computing." PCGamesN reported that $3 billion was used for the research and development of the NVIDIA Volta GPUs.
No release date has been given for this new product. According to Korea Portal, however, it is set for launch before the month ends. Meanwhile, MarketRealist estimates that it will come out by the third quarter of 2017. Similarly, no price has been announced for the NVIDIA Volta GPU.
Should the 2017 release date push through, this can spell bad news for AMD, which will also be releasing its RX Vega GPU within the year. According to Wccftech, the company is struggling with producing enough units in time for its launch due to limited supplies of one of its components. It is rumored to be able to produce only 16,000 GPUs before the intended launch date.
