The name of NVIDIA's next generation GPU architecture has just appeared over at Heise.de. From the looks of it, it's rumored that the next generation NVIDIA GPU architecture will be "Ampere" and will succeed Pascal, at least in the gaming market.

NVIDIA's Next Generation GeForce GPU Rumored To Be Called "Ampere" - Arrives Next Year, Unveil at GTC 2018

According to Heise, NVIDIA is preparing a next generation GPU known as "Ampere" which they are planning to unveil at GTC 2018. There are currently no details available but rumors are that NVIDIA will be jumping straight from Pascal to Ampere, at least on the GeForce front. The site alleges that the Ampere family of graphics cards will succeed the GeForce 10 series cards which are based on the Pascal GPU architecture.

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The GTX-1000 graphics cards are all based on Pascal series GPUs. Information on upcoming GPU generation, which should appear under the name "ampere", there should be the GPU Technology Conference 2018. via Heise

Now considering this is just a rumor and no other details are mentioned, it's advised to take this information with a grain of salt. We know for a fact that the Volta GPU is the official replacement for the Pascal GPU, according to the roadmaps. There is no mention of an Ampere GPU till now and the road map past Volta is yet to be updated. Volta has already made an appearance at GTC 2017 earlier this year and is available on the market since September 2017.

During their recent financials of Q3 FY18 where NVIDIA posted a record revenue of $2.64 billion, the Datacenter and Gaming market both saw stunning increases all round. The gaming market amounted to 59% and the Data center market amounted to 19%. With this trend we can see that Pascal is still going strong while Volta GPUs pushed the Datacenter market with a near $100 Billion revenue increase compared to the first quarter of the fiscal year.

The Volta GPUs are showing their power by tapping in every major cloud computing and AI company, Amazon and Baidu are just a few key examples. There are also products aside from the Tesla based V100 cards that ship with Volta GPUs. We have seen the Xavier SOC and Drive Pegasus board which also feature a discrete and SOC based solution, based on the Volta GPU architecture.

So, if everything goes as planned, we will get Volta early next year for consumers in GeForce and Quadro flavors. But rumors are saying otherwise and they are talking about this new chip known as Ampere. It might seem odd and there could be some reasoning behind why there's a different GPU for consumers and AI/DL users such as implementation of INT8/FP64 and Tensor cores that are not needed on the consumer end. But NVIDIA has made separate GPUs under the same uArch previously. Kepler and Pascal, all had variations of chips which were specifically designed to meet the requirements of the HPC market. Pascal is a better example, as we saw the GP100 never ship to the consumer market while GP102, GP104, GP106, GP107 and GP108 are different variants based on the same Pascal uArch which were designed for consumers.

We may see Ampere or a new GPU with a different name at GTC since the Volta roadmap is complete. But we aren't sure if that will succeed Volta or Pascal in the consumer market. There's a lot happening next year and we will keep you posted with the latest bits. Just one piece of advice: don't treat this post as fact. It's a rumor and more digging is required to check what's really up at NVIDIA.