Latest Nvidia Ampere GTX 2080 Release rumors Just random Speculation

Rumor has it that a new Nvidia Ampere architecture will be powering the company’s next generation of graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 2080 and GTX 2070, based on the alleged Ampere GA104 GPU, are said to appear in April — but to be honest, they are just random speculation.

Rumor: New Nvidia Ampere based GeForce 2000 Series Graphics Cards to appear in April

All recent Nvidia Ampere noises come from German site, 3DCenter.org. The news piece posted by the publication is basically a round-up of speculative chatter of its own forum members.

It all started when a forumite, by the name of Hübie, suggested that TSMC had halted production of Nvidia GP102 GPU, the Pascal chip powering the flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and GTX Titan products. According to the report, the GP102 entered EOL (End of Life) status sometime around early November last year.

Now it’s possible that Nvidia already have a surplus of GPUs, but production is limited by an industry wide shortage of memory. Or, the chip maker might have decided not to create extra Pascal silicon right now, as crypto miners have been stealing away all of their graphics cards causing prices to skyrocket.

RELATED: Next-Gen Nvidia Volta Gaming GPUs hinted to Launch in Q3 2018

But, folks over at 3DCenter believe this is an indication that 1080 Ti will soon go permanently out of stock. Further, based on that unsubstantiated rumour, they are speculating Nvidia will announce a brand new architecture, known as Ampere, in March.

Not only this, but the report states that production of Nvidia Ampere GA104 will begin sometime this month, and cards based on the GPU, including the GeForce GTX 2080 and GTX 2070, will arrive in April. Meaning, Nvidia will announce and release a whole new GPU generation within just four to six weeks. Does that make any sense to you?

But wait… what about Nvidia Volta?

Nvidia launched Volta in the form of their AI-focused Tesla V100 accelerator in May last year. At the heart of V100 is the Volta GV100 GPU featuring a staggering 21.1 billion transistors, 5,120 CUDA cores, 16GB of HBM2 memory, and 640 dedicated Tensor cores.

If we are to buy into this rumor then it seems that Nvidia Volta will only serve as a machine learning and HPC (high-performance computing) architecture, while Ampere will be powering the next-gen gaming cards.

That said, at the moment there is nothing vaguely official about the existence of an Ampere architecture, not even close to a leak. The rumors about the codename sprouted from German site, Heise.de, which suggested the new GPU generation will be unveiled at Nvidia’s own GTC event in March.

So until Nvidia say something new about GPUs in March, we should take such speculation with a cosmos of salt—especially in the light of what CEO Jen-Hsun said at their recent Q4 earnings call. Hsun reiterated that the company expects “Pascal to continue to be the world’s best gaming platform for the foreseeable future,” which makes a Spring launch seem unlikely.

Nevertheless, we’re keeping an eye out and will update you when something way more trustworthy appears. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on these Nvidia Ampere rumors in the comments section below.