After dominating the PC gaming market with RTX 40 “Ada” lineup, NVIDIA will also stick to a monolithic design with its next-gen RTX 50 series. Codenamed Blackwell, these graphics cards are slated to land in late 2024 or early 2025. Sources claim that Team Green will leverage TSMC’s 3nm class process technology alongside GDDR7 memory and a wide bus.
According to @kopite7kimi, Ada-Next (Blackwell) seems to be another monolithic chip rather than a chiplet design. AMD’s RDNA 3 lineup already leverages a chiplet architecture with one GPU and several disaggregated memory controller/cache dies. Intel went a monolithic design with its 1st Gen Arc Alchemist family but plans to move to a tiled architecture with the succeeding Battlemage family.
It’s too early to predict the specifications of Blackwell, but you can be sure of some radical changes to the memory and SM (compute unit). Kimi believes that we may see a massive 512-bit memory bus, wider than anything we see on single-die GPUs. The memory will also be upgraded to GDDR7, bringing substantial bandwidth gains.
It's too early to discuss Blackwell now. I won't be surprised if it has a 512-bit memory interface.
We might even see external bandwidths of up to 2 TB/s on higher-end parts. The SM hasn’t undergone any notable changes over the last two generations, so there’s a good chance it’ll be revamped this time.
Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have written about computer hardware for over seven years with over 5000 published articles. I started during engineering college and haven't stopped since. On the side, I play RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Divinity, and Fallout. Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
