According to a report from Chinese website MyDrivers, NVIDIA is looking to spruce things up on its line-up with a much earlier than expected Q3 Volta Launch. Remember that Volta was expected, according to NVIDIA's own road-maps, to launch around early 2018. The report indicates that NVIDIA's Volta products - apparently to be marketed as the GeForce 20-series - will see an early launch due to market demands, and NVIDIA's intention to further increase pricing of its products through a new-generation launch.
These stand, for now, as only rumors (and not the first time they've surfaced at that), but paint a pretty interesting picture, nonetheless. Like Intel with its Coffee Lake series, pushing a product launch to earlier than expected has consequences: production, logistics, infrastructure, product roadmaps, and stock of existing previous-generation products must all be taken into account. And with NVIDIA just recently having introduced its performance-champions GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp graphics cards, all of this seems a trigger pull too early - especially when taking into account the competition landscape in high-performance graphics, which is akin to a single green-colored banner poised atop the Himalayas. And NVIDIA must not forget the fact that AMD could be pulling a black swan off its engineering department with Vega, like it did with its Ryzen series of CPUs.
Any new Volta products would most likely use HBM2 or GDDR5X memory, considering that Micron itself is looking to begin sampling its GDDR6 products towards the end of 2017 or early 2018. With AMD's Vega languishing in the corner as we expect it to finally make an appearance, which also carries HBM2 memory, it would be expected that its availability is good enough to power multiple graphics cards from both vendors. And if previous rumors are true, the usage of a cutting-edge 12 nm process is also in the works.
The only reason I see NVIDIA pulling Volta's Launch to 3Q2017 is to steal some thunder from AMD's expected 2Q2017 Vega launch, looking to stay buyer's hands from jumping ship. If there were some products to be launched, I would expect a Pascal refresh until 2018's actual GeForce-branded Volta, especially considering how NVIDIA can easily put its mainstream GPUs in direct competition to AMD's recently released RX 500 series. Volta being launched for the HPC market, however, makes sense: NVIDIA's "Datacenter" revenue is posting the company's greatest increases QoQ and YoY. It is, in potential, a much more lucrative market than its gaming segment, and it would make total sense to see NVIDIA pulling its Volta architecture towards the HPC market, much like the company did with its GP100 Pascal chip.
Source: NVIDIA's Volta Reportedly Poised for Anticipated, Early Q3 2017 Launch | techPowerUp
