NVIDIA’s Ampere GPUs were initially rumored to launch in March during GTC 2020, but courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, everything got canned. Jensen’s GTC keynote was first switched to an online-only event and ultimately canceled. As a result, NVIDIA was forced to reschedule its Ampere launch, and according to sources, it will now happen at Computex. Like many other shows, Computex too has been delayed from May to all the way to September-end.
A report from Tweaktown alleges that NVIDIA is planning to announce its RTX 30 Series GPUs based on the new Ampere microarchitecture in August, followed by a launch at Computex. Initially, it was expected that Team Green would only reveal the Data Center and Work Center parts at GTC, but considering the long delay, it’s very likely that we’ll be seeing the consumer lineup as well.
NVIDIA’s Ampere GPUs should bring notable improvements to both raster performance as well as ray-tracing capabilities. Considering that both the next-gen consoles and AMD’s Navi 2x GPUs are going to support hardware-level ray-tracing, the technology should finally see widespread adoption with better performance across the board.
NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series GPUs are expected to leverage either Samsung’s 8nm or TSMC’s 7nm node. Looking at how efficient NVIDIA’s 14nm architecture is, I wouldn’t be surprised if they go ahead with Samsung’s more mature (less dense) node. For now though, we have the COVID-19 virus to deal with. Unless the pandemic is brought under control, we’ll have much worse issues to deal with than delayed computer hardware.
