Nvidia has reportedly delayed the launch of its Ampere architecture and GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The company was originally poised to launch Ampere, which will move to a new 7nm process and is expected to deliver up to a 75% performance hike compared to its current 12nm Turing architecture, at its GTC conference in March, but Nvidia cancelled the show entirely earlier this month due to the global coronavirus pandemic.
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Tweaktown is reporting that Nvidia now plans debut the Ampere GPU architecture in August this year, with a full launch planned for the newly-rescheduled Computex conference in September.
The architecture will reportedly debut alongside higher-end Quadro RTX offerings, the report notes, while previous rumors suggested Ampere would also initially feature in Nvidia’s data-center focused Tesla accelerator cards.
While bad news for gamers, this is hardly surprising; Nvidia tends to release graphics architectures for professionals and data centers first before the consumer-facing architecture behind GeForce.
Where's GeForce?
Tweaktown claims that following this business-centric launch, Nvidia will launch its consumer-facing GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards later in the year. The report notes that Nvidia’s incoming GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards will both arrive based on the new Ampere GPU architecture “packing some gigantic new performance improvements, and equally as impressive power efficiency.”
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which will reportedly be up to 40% faster than its predecessor, is also expected to launch by the end of 2020, complete with 5376 CUDA Cores, a 384-bit memory bus and 12GB of VRAM.
While Covid-19 has affected Nvidia’s launch plans for 2020, it hasn’t impacted the company financially. A separate report in Bloomberg, citing Nvidia management, claims that Team Green has seen a 50% surge in "total gaming hours from its installed base as many students and workers were staying-at-home".
The company’s data center business, which generated almost a third of revenue in the latest quarter, is also said to be surging due to the rise of people working from home.
The report also notes that the timing of Ampere GPUs being available to purchase may not have changed. It says "new products" remain on track and are "expected to contribute revenue in the current quarter.
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