Talking to analysts, Jeff Fisher, SVP of Gaming for NVIDIA answered some of the burning questions the press has had with respect to Ampere or the RTX 30 series graphics cards. While much of it was simply Fisher marketing the new GPUs, explaining how much of an improvement they really are compared to Turing, there was some useful info in there as well.
Fisher said that the new GPUs are in volume production and shipping to AIB partners has already started. Although he did accept that there will be severe shortages, he didn’t say anything about poor 8nm yields or lack of data about the new node. He simply stated that the shortage was the result of increased demand from the end consumer and that the company was working to address it.
Towards the end, he said that the supply should stabilize towards the holiday season, in other words, near the end of Decemeber. That basically means stocks for the RTX 30 series GPUs will be back to normal in 2021.
“As you know, we take a great deal at trying to take care of our channel, and we wanted to make sure that we had sold through prior product before we rolled out some new generation products at certain price points. With Ampere, the channel’s healthy and the business is strong. And we are prepared for a pretty healthy cadence of rolling out new devices. I think you’ll see Ampere’s cadence of new parts to be faster than what you saw on Turing.”
“Whenever we launch a new product and as compelling as Ampere is, there will no doubt be shortage of product. We just can’t — you can’t ramp a fab to follow that front load of demand of new buyers that quickly. So that said, we have a great relationship with Samsung. The product is in volume production. We’ve begun shipping to our channel partners, and you will start — you will see volume product hitting the shelf starting on the dates that we’ve announced. And it will — naturally, as the entire supply chain ramps continue to grow as we get toward the holiday season.”
Jeff Fisher, SVP of Gaming for NVIDIA
Furthermore, he went on to say that we’ll soon be seeing newer GPUs (devices) based on the Ampere architecture. Compared to Turing the gap between the launch dates of the higher-end and budget-oriented GPUs should be much smaller. This is NVIDIA basically saying that as soon as AMD launches the Navi 2x cards, it’ll launch its entire Ampere stack including the RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 Ti.
