According to a story published exclusively by Tweaktown, NVIDIA's brand new series will not be called the 20-series, rather the 11-series. This corroborates news of a new lineup that we heard a while ago (that too from Tweaktown). The report also states that NVIDIA is going to be launching a new lineup of graphics card at GTC in a few hours going against what some pubs had been stating. Anthony seems pretty confident of the launch so assuming it happens, the next question is whether we are going to be seeing Ampere or Turing.

Tweaktown: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 11 Series Lineup Reportedly Launching At GTC 2018 - GeForce 10 Series Now "Out of Stock" At NV Official

Now we have heard a lot of chatter about both Ampere and Turing at this point and its anyone's guess really what we will see at GTC 2018. All of this started from a rumor by the famous 3DCenter forums where it was stated that the Pascal flagship, the GP102 has already reached EOL (end-of-life) indicating that not only will it be going out of stock soon, but that NVIDIA already has a replacement ready. This seems to have been confirmed as the Pascal based graphics cards are all out of stock over at NVIDIA's store right now.

NVIDIA Hints At RTX 3080 Graphics Card With 20GB Memory

So, unless NVIDIA has mysteriously run out of stock simultaneously and in the same instance as GTC 2018 (which would be a coincidence of epic proportions) NVIDIA is getting ready for the launch of a new series of graphics cards - the GTX 11 series, if TT is to be believed. Now, before we get into the entire Turing and Ampere debate, keep in mind that there is another angle that you will have to look out for during GTC this time - the pricing.

This is going to be the first instance after the mining boom that NV will be launching a flagship and the pricing is going to set quite a precedent. Rumors have claimed previously that it is going to be an exorbitantly high amount from previous MSRP levels (which were $649 for the flagship) as high as $999 and even above. That said, those rumors were about Turing, the alleged brand new architecture and if this lineup is more of a refresh then a successor, then we probably aren't going to see a price hike so soon. At any rate, lets wait a few hours and see. If you still want to dig into some good ol' speculation, feel free to read on.

NVIDIA Turing and Ampere

According to Reuters, A brand new NVIDIA Turing GPU is launching at GTC 2018. This means that either NVIDIA is undergoing a massive rebranding campaign or that Volta will not be making it to the consumer side of things. This in itself has interesting implications, because it could mean a couple of things: anywhere from NVIDIA optimizing the architecture further to yield concerns.

In any case, before we go further, a short intro to Turing. The codename Turing of course refers to Alan Turing who is considered the father of modern computing and was the chief architect of the British program to break Enigma machine encryption, used by Germany to encrypt communications during World War II. He is also the person behind the concept of the Turing machine, a hypothetical device that can simulate any algorithm regardless of how complex it is. Programming languages that can simulate this device are referred to as Turing complete languages.

Now there are two possibilities as I see them. 1) NVIDIA decided to ditch the Ampere codename because it’s very similar to another company - an ARM server maker called Ampere - or 2) it decided to fork the upcoming architecture into two distinct flavors, namely Ampere and Turing. Both possibilities are just as likely as NVIDIA has been known to do that in the past simply to discredit the leak scene (anyone remember the GeForce GTX 800 series?).

NVIDIA Quadro RTX (Ampere) To Feature The Full Fat GA102 GPU With Over 10,000 Cores & 48 GB of GDDR6 Memory

The second possibility however is much more exciting, it could mean that NVIDIA is preparing two distinct products in the consumer space: Ampere and Turing. Since there have been rumors floating of a cryptocurrency focused product from the company soon, then it could mean that the Turing GPU is actually the one NVIDIA will market as the mining variant. This makes a semblance of sense, because Alan Turing is well known for his work on cryptography. In fact he was part of the team that cracked the Enigma machine which resulted in the World War being won.

If Alan Turing's cryptographic roots are indeed being honored in this new product then it could very well mean that NVIDIA is becoming very serious about cryptocurrencies. The company has already given its customers free reign to use its GeForce GPUs in data center environments as long as they are used for 'blockchain mining' purposes so this wouldn't be entirely out of character. Of course there remains the remote possibility that Reuters is simply wrong about this and there is only one GPU which will in fact be called Ampere after all.