Nvidia’s next-generation consumer GPUs, reportedly named Blackwell, are a hotly debated topic, especially now we seem to be inching ever closer to a likely release date. While Nvidia remains tight-lipped about its latest crop of graphics cards, the rumour mill does seem to be getting closer to a consensus with a report suggesting that board manufacturers are anticipating a launch in the fourth quarter of 2024.
According to Money UDN, board partners are anticipating an initial launch of high-end cards like the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 at the end of this year (via Videocardz), while analysts are optimistic about a boost in shipment volumes and a potential upping of the average selling price of graphics card products.
Known Nvidia leaker Kopite7kimi has appeared to confirm the speculation, responding to the Twitter post detailing the latest rumours with a plain and simple “True”.
Of course this new information still remains as speculation at this point, and should be taken with the appropriately heavy dose of salt. That being said, a fourth quarter launch this year would make a whole lot of sense, given that the last generation’s launch cadence was preceded by a Hopper announcement in March 2022, followed by Ada Lovelace in September of the same year, with the RTX 4090 eventually launching on October 12, 2022.
Nvidia recently announced Hopper’s successor, two massive dual-GPU packages named the Blackwell B200 and B100 respectively. These AI-crunching monsters are, like Hopper, designed for the commercial market for data-centre compute purposes, and were also announced in March.
Who knows if Nvidia plans on maintaining the same gap between commercial product announcement and consumer GPUs, but it doesn’t seem a huge stretch to suggest we might see something announced in September given the previous pattern.
This would contradict leaked slides from last year that suggested a mysterious “Ada Lovelace-Next” coming in 2025. However, given that information has been thin on the ground regarding Nvidia’s next generation of consumer GPUs since then, it’s entirely possible, nay, likely, that announcement schedules and launch windows may have been moved significantly, even if the slides were accurate at the time.
As to what these GPUs will look like and the sort of performance we can expect to receive, we’re still collecting Blackwell rumours and diving through Twitter speculation to get an idea as to what we might expect.
Still, the Blackwell B200/B100 announcement gave us some good ideas as to some features that might make the leap into the next-generation of Nvidia consumer GPUs, including fifth-generation Tensor Cores, a new decompression engine, and cards likely built on TSMC’s 4NP process node.
And so the rumour mill trundles on, but at this point the hype does seem to be building. Time will tell if all this speculation turns out to be correct, but if so it shouldn’t be too long before we get a look at this hotly-anticipated next generation silicon for ourselves.
www.pcgamer.com