Today, in a delayed keynote at GTC, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will unveil the Nvidia Ampere GPU architecture. From gaming to datacenter, cloud, and AI, the Ampere architecture will underpin every graphics card Nvidia ships in the next 1-2 years.

"Ampere will eventually replace Nvidia's Turing and Volta chips and become the single platform that streamlines Nvidia's GPU lineup," Juan reportedly said at a recent Ampere pre-briefing. 'Undoubtedly, this is the first time we've integrated the entire datacenter acceleration workload into a single platform. [Turing is the graphics architecture used in Nvidia's current gaming graphics cards, from the GTX 1650 to the RTX 2080 Ti, and Ampere may just be a replacement for the old professional Volta design. There was some speculation that Ampere was just a replacement for the old professional Volta design, but it has been confirmed that the GPU architecture announced today will be included in our gaming PCs.

There is no hint yet as to when that will be, but we expect an announcement/release sometime in August/September.

The only real mention of a gaming card expected to appear later this year was after a question about what the potential differences are between consumer and professional GPU designs.9]

"There is a huge overlap in architecture," Huang was reported to have said.

but "there is no overlap in the configuration."

This is not surprising given that MarketWatch reports that the Ampere architecture, believed to be the GA100 GPU in the DGX A100 server, is a 7nm design with over 54 billion transistors. For reference, the top 12nm Turing GPU has 18.6 billion transistors and the V100 Volta GPU has 21.1 billion transistors.

That's a lot of transistors. [So while 7nm may increase the transistor density of GPUs, it would be a huge chunk of silicon, and 48 billion transistors would be too expensive to put on a graphics card in a PC. [In particular, Ampere is being used at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to explore the possibility of a vaccine for COVID-19.

"The computational power of the new DGX A100 system coming to Argonne will help researchers study treatments and vaccines," said Rick Stevens, deputy director of Argonne.

That's probably worth a little more than running real-time ray tracing at 4K at 60 fps or better.