Washington [US]: American tech giant Nvidia is getting ready to announce its next-gen GPU architecture, codenamed Lovelace.
According to The Verge, Ampere is the current GPU architecture that powers Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs, after Turing debuted with the first RTX cards in 2018. Nvidia is now expected to detail its Lovelace GPU architecture at GTC 2022 in September, with CEO Jensen Huang hinting at an announcement during the company’s recent earnings call.
“We’ll get through this over the next few months and go into next year with our new architecture. I look forward to telling you more about it at GTC next month,” said Huang, while discussing a slowdown in gaming GPU demand, reported The Verge.
A new GPU architecture announcement doesn’t mean users will get to see RTX 40-series GPUs immediately, though.
Nvidia first unveiled its Ampere architecture for data centres, before launching its RTX 30-series cards for consumers months later. There’s always a slight delay between an architecture announcement and a consumer GPU launch.
Rumours continue to suggest Nvidia is working on RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 GPUs. Huang also hinted that current-gen RTX 30-series GPUs will live alongside next-gen ones.
The reason RTX 30-series and 40-series will likely co-exist is that Nvidia has built too many GPUs. It’s currently being forced to adjust retail pricing due to excess inventory, and RTX 30-series cards have been appearing at MSRP recently, following years of prices being hiked 2-3x by resellers.
The crypto crash has affected GPU demand, and the excess inventory makes it more difficult to predict when Nvidia is likely to actually put its RTX 40-series cards on shelves, as per The Verge.
