Lovelace Might Be Nvidia's Next-Gen Gaming Architecture

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Nvidia's Ampere architecture has just fairly recently arrived to consumers (at least for those who've managed to find it in stock), but that hasn't stopped leakers from figuring out what's next on Nvidia's agenda, at least for its future gaming architectures. 3dCenter.org Tweeted on new rumored specifications for Nvidia's future "Lovelace" AD102 chip, which might include 144 SMs and 18432 CUDA cores with around 66 TFlops of computing performance.

Beware, this is entirely based on rumors, and with how little we know about Nvidia's next GPU architectures, there's a huge chance most of this info is wrong. But, at least this post can give us some clues as to where Nvidia is headed.

One part of this rumor that does make sense is the codename "Lovelace"; Jensen a few years back at CES of 2018 was wearing a T-shirt with several names of popular mathematicians all through history. And with Nvidia's love for codenaming architectures with names of mathematicians, many believe Jensen was leaking the names of future architectures on his T-Shirt. One of those names was Lovelace.

If you don't know who Lovelace was, her full name was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Daughter of English poet and politician Lord Byron, she is better known as Ada Lovelace. She was an English mathematician and writer in the early to mid-1800s, known for her work on Charles Babbage's mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Due to this computer's ability to run algorithms and the inclusion of a memory system, it was deemed as one of the first real computers that could think logically. Lovelace was also responsible for writing an algorithm (possibly the first) designed for the Analytical Engine, and thus is deemed one of the world's first computer programmers in history.

It would be a tall order, but let's hope Nvidia's Lovelace architecture can live up to her name. if the rumors are true for this AD102 chip, Lovelace has a theoretical 71% performance increase over the Ampere architecture. Plus, if Nvidia can significantly increase Lovelace's performance per watt, we could see performance improvements that rival Pascal's release.

If you were wondering about Nvidia's other rumored architecture, Hopper, it seems right now that both Hopper and Lovelace are in the works. What makes Hopper interesting is its multi-die design, which would be a first for Nvidia. What we could see is Lovelace being Nvidia's gaming architecture, as one die decreases latency, then we could see Hopper as being a data center exclusive.

Again, take this all with a grain of salt, as rumors on both Lovelace and Hopper are so early into Nvidia's development of its next GPUs that we really don't know what is fact just yet.