As we ready for an exciting week ahead, with all the new products and announcements lined up for CES 2020, there are still plenty of things to get excited about arriving later in 2020. Later this year, for example, Nvidia is set to unveil its new Ampere GPU architecture, and we will get to see the possibilities offered by the second generation of GeForce RTX graphics cards. The Taipei Times has just published a report on this upcoming event and it sounds like Ampere will leave PC gamers and enthusiasts eager for the release of products based upon Nvidia's newest GPUs.
The Taipei Times report contains a couple of claims that you might want to digest with a pinch of salt or two. The two main claims are bullet pointed below, for clarity:
- Ampere will deliver a 50 per cent increase in graphics performance,
- Ampere will deliver the performance uplift noted above while halving power consumption.
Quite often with new CPU and GPU architectures we hear about there being a device designer choice whether to enable a big boost in performance, go all-in for efficiency, or deliver a product which balances these attractions. From the referenced report, it sounds like Nvidia's Ampere GPU can deliver in spades with regard to both metrics, simultaneously.
The Taipei Times report stems from information supplied to investors by Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co., based in Taipei. By all accounts Yuanta looks like a heavyweight brokerage and investment banking company. While the investor note mentioned the Nvidia Ampere GPU performance and efficiency upgrades as above, it did so with a view to the knock-on effects felt by local PCs and component companies like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. Obviously these companies will benefit to a greater degree if Nvidia really pulls out a sizable upgrade as it moves to 7nm GPUs. PC gamers and enthusiasts would definitely welcome such an upgrade, if pricing is attractive.
Unfortunately we don't have any further info or sources with regard to expected Ampere performance/efficiency uplifts. We will have to wait for GTC in March for something solid to digest according to the Twitter grapevine. Remember, if the 50 per cent uplift is actually correct it might refer to some narrow metric like an improvement in raytracing performance. Companies always highlight the biggest and best improvements between generations, of course, that is the nature of the business.
