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Nvidia’s 7nm GPUs aimed at data center usage have been delayed, at least according to an analyst – making us wonder about a potential knock-on effect in terms of a delay for Nvidia’s next-gen consumer graphics cards.
The analyst in question is Chris Caso, who works for Raymond James Financial (an investment bank in the US), and as highlighted by Seeking Alpha, Caso reckons that he hasn’t observed the typical ‘channel activity’ which would normally represent the build-up to the launch of a product.
In this case, that 7nm product must surely mean data center GPUs which Caso was expecting to be launched this quarter by Nvidia (although this is the first we’ve heard of that scenario, admittedly – indeed earlier this year, Nvidia’s CEO indicated that there was no rush to 7nm, such was his confidence in Turing).
The analyst believes that this 7nm product is indeed still inbound, but has been delayed to Q1 or Q2 of 2020.
These data center offerings would be heavyweight GPUs targeted at high-performance computing – the sort of products that in the past have preceded the launch of the next-generation of Nvidia’s consumer graphics cards.
For example, Volta-based Tesla GPUs followed on from Pascal cards in May 2017, with Nvidia’s Titan V subsequently emerging in December using Volta, and then Turing-based graphics cards followed in September 2018.
This is all guesswork based on rumors, of course, but if the 7nm data center GPUs have indeed been delayed by a quarter or two, could that potentially push the consumer products further out as well?
Amping things down
Previous speculation has indicated that Nvidia might release its next-gen consumer GPUs as soon as the first half of 2020, although at the time, we noted that the first Ampere next-gen products could indeed be high-performance computing offerings.
So that first half of 2020 launch date would line up with what the analyst is saying in terms of a Q1 or Q2 release next year. If that’s correct, as to what that might mean for the timeframe of consumer graphics cards following on, it then seems likely that we’re looking more towards the end of 2020 – or perhaps even 2021.
Which would leave Nvidia facing the prospect of AMD’s ‘Nvidia killer’ coming out unchallenged in the middle of 2020, and perhaps that’s why we’ve recently seen chatter and rumors floating around theorizing that Nvidia may introduce a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super as a stopgap to combat the rival high-end offering.
As ever, keep chucking the salt around in plentiful quantities with all this…
Via PCGamesN