At Nvidia, graphics card generations will apparently remain on the market longer in the future. The manufacturer itself has – probably without thinking – shown a GPU roadmap that shows a successor to the RTX 4000 graphics cards aka Ada Lovelace for the year 2025.
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The roadmap comes from a briefing on machine learning benchmarks and actually focuses on high-performance computing (HPC) products: Grace, Hopper and Bluefield. As an aside, one slide lists “Ada Lovelace Next” as a placeholder for a new codename, like the website Hardwareluxx noticed.
In addition to HPC products, an Nvidia roadmap also shows a successor to the GeForce graphics card generation Ada Lovelace (RTX 4000).
(Image: Nvidia, via Hardwareluxx)
Moving away from the 2-year cycle
With the GeForce RTX 4090, the first 4000 graphics card was released in October 2022. The RTX 4000 series would therefore have a lifetime of at least two years and two months – but since Nvidia typically introduces new graphics cards in spring or summer, it would also be 2, 5 years conceivable.
The 3000 and 2000 series came two years earlier: The GeForce models RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 appeared in September 2020, the RTX 2080 in September 2018. Before that there was a longer wait – the GTX 1080 came in May 2016, was therefore only replaced after two years and four months. A lifespan that has now been extended again is another indication that there could be a problem with the 3-nanometer production of the chip order manufacturer TSMC.
GeForce RTX 4090 Ti illustrated
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However, new graphics cards should still appear before 2025. At the peak of performance, Nvidia has plenty of room for a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti: The previous GeForce RTX 4090 (without Ti) uses a heavily slimmed down AD102 GPU, in which 128 of the 144 available shader multiprocessors are active. A new top model could use up to 18,432 instead of 16,384 shader cores – an increase of 12.5 percent.
Images of alleged pre-production models confirm that Nvidia is working on a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti. They show a particularly thick Founders Edition, which occupies four slots and uses an unusual structure: the board is on the lower edge, i.e. at right angles to the slot bracket and parallel to the mainboard.
Even below the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, Nvidia would have potential for a new edition like the RTX 2000 Super graphics cards, for example with more graphics memory – a major criticism of models like the GeForce RTX 4070.
(mma)