Nvidia has played it coy in regards to what comes after Pascal for gaming. The rumors of a next-gen GPU launch have been heating up, however, and Nvidia added to them by teasing a GeForce Gaming Celebration just ahead of Gamescom.
The off-site event is scheduled for August 20, the day before Gamesom gets underway. If we are reading between the lines with an optimistic eye, it sure sounds like new hardware will finally be announced, though Nvidia stopped short of saying as much. Instead, it said "GeForce will loom large" at the world's biggest gaming expo.
If that weren't enough, Nvidia also promised "spectacular surprises" at the event.
"The event will be loaded with new, exclusive, hands-on demos of the hottest upcoming games, stage presentations from the world’s biggest game developers, and some spectacular surprises," Nvidia said.
Nvidia has not been real forthcoming with when it plans to move on from Pascal in the consumer segment. Back at Computex, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to a question about the arrival of its next-gen GeForce cards by saying, "It will be a long time from now. I'll invite you, and there will be lunch."
Well, guess what? We could use a bite right about now. Perhaps we'll get it—Nvidia has formally invited anyone and everyone who is interested to attend the "epic event" on August 20. Whether there will be lunch, we don't know, but we suspect (and hope) there will be a GeForce 11 series announcement.
Nvidia's launch, whether on August 20 or some other time, can't come fast enough. Pascal has been on the market for more than two years now, starting with the Tesla P100 accelerator for data centers and followed by the GeForce 10 series for gaming. Nvidia has since released a Volta GPU, which is found in the Tesla V100 and Titan V. Both are geared towards AI workloads though.
The GeForce 11 series is rumored to be based on GPU called Turing (we've also heard the name Ampere thrown around). It's not clear if Turing is a variation of Volta, or something else entirely, perhaps more closely related to Pascal. Hopefully we will find out in just a few weeks.
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