NVIDIA Volta is expected to come up with monster next-generation specs to solidly outperform AMD's Radeon RX Vega. The green team will be contracting Taiwan Semiconductor as manufacturing partner for its next-generation GPU, which may be based on a leaner 12 nm fabrication process than Vega's 14 nm.

NVIDIA has long been a GPU market leader until early reports of the Vega threatens the green team's long-held position. The AMD Radeon RX Vega is the red team's answer to NVIDIA's fastest card in the market, the newly announced GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. However, NVIDIA will not take the challenge sitting down and is reported to be working with the next-generation NVIDIA Volta architecture. Not much information has been known or leaked about the Pascal successor, other than the fact that it will be working with TSMC particularly in the manufacturing of the upcoming Volta GPUs.

NVIDIA has reportedly returned to TSMC after reports that it is also working with Samsung's 14 nm GP107 silicon. It could be that NVIDIA opted for a smaller die shrink, which is by theory equivalent to huge performance gains. Global Foundries has proven this in its 12nm process achieving 15 percent improvements in performance while consuming 50 percent less power than the 16nm process, Motley Fool has learned. Recently, TSMC revealed a stop-gap measure between the current node and the yet unreachable 7nm lithography, the 12nm mode. The shrunken process is based on the current 16nm design with marked improvements in performance, density, and energy efficiency.

There is strong indication that NVIDIA will be applying TSMC's updated 16nm design to solidly outperform Vega's own improvements in performance and power from a shrunken fabrication process. It is reported to use the GDDR6 memory or the HBM2 just like Vega to deliver speeds of 16Gbps from the 10Gbps in the GTX 1080's GDDRX5. All these will be known before the year ends if NVIDIA sticks to the timetable since the green team has already failed to deliver the NVIDIA Volta GPU in the supercomputer of the Oak Ridge National Library.

The NVIDIA roadmap now sets the Volta in 2018 as the green team is expected to still squeeze more from its Pascal architecture. The Volta GPUs will more likely come in the GTX 30 series, the GTX 3080 and 3080 Ti in the high-end of the market with the 3070 in the mid-range. Meanwhile, the GTX 20 series will be Pascal refresh GPUs to be launched within this year. The said series will be lower in prices and delivers improved performance from the GTX 10 series according to #mce_temp_url#Market Realist. The GPU market may even hear of a full-fat GP102 GPU, where GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan X were based from to be announced in the NVIDIA's GPU technology in May.

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Tags NVIDIA Volta, TSMC, Gpu, AMD Vega