RED HAT LINUX6 REVIEW

NVIDIA VOLTA

Vital stats

• Nvidia Volta release date
  Mid-2018 seems like the most likely release for Volta-based gaming cards, because they're definitely not launching anything in March. But if you can't wait Nvidia have launched the $3,000 Titan V...
  
• Nvidia Volta specsThe professional-class Volta – the Tesla V100 – uses TSMC's 12nm FinFET design and the full GV100 GPU has 5,376 CUDA cores. Imagine a GTX 2080 Ti with that.
• Nvidia Volta priceDon't shoot the messenger, but it's possible the consumer Volta cards will push
  prices up again. $699 for the GTX 2080? Not beyond the realms of possibility...
• 
  
  Nvidia Volta performance

  We're too early in the release cycle for there to be any performance figures flying around, but we're hoping for greater efficiency and better with DX12 and Vulkan

The Nvidia Volta graphics architecture is the next big thing coming out of the green team’s GPU skunkworks and has had its first professional-level, ultra-expensive processor, the V100 officially unveiled. Volta is the silicon successor to the Pascal generation of graphics cards, the generation that brought us the mighty GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp, and is gearing up to deliver the GTX 1070 Ti soon. But can it deliver the same generational performance boost offered by Nvidia's impressive last-gen graphics silicon?

If the gaming performance of the Volta GPUs we'll end up seeing in our PCs next year provide anything like the performance delta the first Tesla V100 silicon is displaying against the last-gen professional Pascal cards then we're in for a treat. Volta, in the pro space, is out-performing Pascal by 132%.

As is Nvidia’s wont the new GPU architecture is taking its name from a famous historical scientist. Alessandro Volta gave his name to the Volt having been a pioneer of electrical energy and its storage. He was also the discoverer of butt-gas - fun little science fact for you there.

But recently there have been the most paper-thin rumours about new Ampere and Turing  codenames being released as the next graphics chips from the Nvidia skunkworks. Both GPU names have come from a single line in two disparate articles surrounding Nvidia financial results, and have no sources to make the names in any way believable. Hell, we can make up spurious codenames in our sleep...

But Volta is a GPU architecture that definitely exists and was first unveiled, at least in theoretical form, at Nvidia’s Graphics Technology Conference way back in 2013. It was originally meant to be the GPU silicon which followed directly on from the Maxwell architecture (which made up the GTX 900-series of graphics cards), but a year later up pops the Pascal design used in the most recent 10-series GeForce parts, pushing the prospective Volta chips further back.