Rumour has it that Nvidia is planning to manufacture its upcoming Volta GPUs using the 12nm fabrication process. It’s said that the green company has already begun requesting for a 12nm fabrication space from its semiconductor partner, TSMC.
Nvidia’s current flagship GPU, Pascal, is made using the 16nm manufacturing process. Knowing this, if this rumour were to indeed be true, then it seems that the company may be skipping 14nm GPUs altogether.
Of course, as many may have already known, a die shrink often means that the newer GPU will come with better performance and power efficiency. Interestingly, leaping from 16nm to 14nm should yield significant differences between Pascal and Volta. Not to mention the fact that Volta may be aided with stacked DRAM (HBM2?) as well.
With Nvidia’s Pascal-based graphics cards currently dominating the high-end GPU market, one can only assume that the trend will continue upon the introduction of Volta. Speaking of which, there has been no strong indication that Volta GPUs will be unveiled anytime soon; one’s best bet would be to wait until the end of 2017 or 2018 for the official unveiling.
Regardless, it’ll be very interesting to see just how powerful Nvidia’s Volta-based graphics cards will be.
(Source: Experview, VideoCardz)
