NVIDIA Volta Specs: Hints About New Architecture Dropped Even Before GTC 2017 Unveiling
Jen-Hsun Huang, president and Chief Executive Officer of NVIDIA, dropped a heavy hint during the company's financial meeting for the first quarter. According to the NVIDIA CEO, the electronics giant is building inventory for a new product, which was announced at this year's Graphics Processing Unit Technology Conference (GTC). The presentation line-up at the event included the highly anticipated NVIDIA Volta.
NVIDIA has their hand in a large number of products across so many markets, such that the GTC presentation by the company could've been for any number of possible products that the company is working on. During the earnings call of NVIDIA for the first quarter of 2017, Huang was asked by an analyst about a sharp increase in the company's inventories within that span of time, as reported by WCCF Tech.
Huang's answer then was quite intriguing. The NVIDIA president replied that they are stockpiling inventory for an upcoming product launch. Which product? At that time, Huang said that his GTC keynote presentation will provide answers.
Indeed, his keynote answered many questions. However, before the product was revealed on May 10 in Silicon Valley, some clues have already come up that led industry watchers to believe that the NVIDIA Volta is the central product at this year's conference. The earlier unveiling made by SK Hynix somewhat confirmed that NVIDIA was preparing for the Volta's reveal.
SK Hynix showed off their Graphics Double Data Rate Type 6 (DDR6) memory during GTC 2017. According to WCCF Tech, this same technology will be used in NVIDIA's latest GPUs built with the Volta chip architecture.
While the launch of NVIDIA Volta is set for 2018, this early reveal by SK Hynix hinted that the graphics card company will be following up the GDDR6 reveal with their own bombshell, this time with an announcement of their latest GPU product.
The new Volta chip is said to be twice as fast as their previous Pascal architecture and is estimated to peak at 9.5 TeraFLOPs of computing power.