Fresh rumors indicate Nvidia wants to retain its leads in consumer graphics with the upcoming Blackwell RTX 50 series. Blackwell is likely to make the transition to a chiplet architecture along with a new denoising accelerator directly built into the RT pipeline. Nvidia apparently also had plans of releasing a consumer version of Hopper just in case AMD beat them to the finish line with RDNA 3.
Although the GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is a very popular product and demand remains high, NVIDIA has allegedly decided to prioritize production of the Hopper H100 AI GPU. While this is not a product for the consumer market, it seems that it brings noticeably higher profits than its sibling usually acquired by gamers.
The H100 specs confirm that the upcoming RTX 4000-series will not feature a chiplet GPU design and the maximum TGP is considerably lower than the rumored 850 W. Even so, the sheer size of the die is supposed to provide enough raw performance to easily compete with AMD's upcoming RDNA3 models.
The H100 Hopper is Nvidia's first GPU with PCIe 5.0 specifications and support for HBM3 VRAM. This model is up to 6 times faster in FP workloads and offers considerably higher scalability compared to previous gen Ampere models. Nvidia is also planning to release a Hopper GPU + Grace CPU superchip and even a dual Grace superchip.
This information appears to be coming via the hacked confidential data stolen from Nvidia a few days ago. The images show driver code mentioning six Ada Lovelace SKUs, two Hopper SKUs and two more Blackwell SKUs. Judging by the number of SKUs, Ada Lovelace is clearly Ampere's successor, and we already knew that Hopper is targeting data centers, but it is still unclear what Blackwell is bringing to the table.
Nvidia's upcoming GH100 Hopper HPC accelerator has aroused quite the interest owing to recent leaks. First, it was the rumored massive die area close to 1000 mm square and now, it is the massive 140 billion transistor count. It is not yet clear how Nvidia would achieve such a high transistor density on the 5 nm package, but it is likely that Hopper will include both monolithic and multi-chip module (MCM) architectures and cater independently to HPC and DL workloads.
Nvidia's upcoming Hopper HPC accelerator, the GH100, is now being rumored to sport a 21% higher surface area compared to Ampere's GA100. And contrary to reports so far, Hopper will continue to be a monolithic die and not a multi-chip module (MCM), though it is also possible that both monolithic and MCM variants of Hopper exist targeting different use cases.
Unconfirmed rumors earlier in the year indicated that Nvidia was working on a next-gen MCM GPU architecture called Hopper. A US Trademark filing for "Nvidia Hopper" by the company indicates that these rumors may indeed be true.
Apparently, Nvidia underestimated the impact of AMD's 7 nm GPUs and is now looking to phase out the upcoming Ampere GPUs faster, as the green team has already pre-booked an important part of TSMC's 5 nm production capacity for 2021, when the Hopper GPUs are expected to hit the market.
China's plan to crash the Bitcoin value appears to have backfired as the crypto coin is back to its values recorded before the crypto mining ban. On top of that, most of the Bitcoin hashing power was relocated from China to other states, helping the U.S. become the leading hashrate provider. The Chinese authorities are now issuing a call for public comments on the decision to add crypto mining to the list of "phased-out" industries.
The Chinese Government has announced that it will further crack down on Bitcoin. The statement doesn't mention any specifics, but we're probably looking at additional restrictions on mining farms and cryptocurrency exchanges.
Anker now reports that it became the "world's No.1 mobile charging brand" in 2020. It also marked its 10th anniversary as such a company in 2021, and attributes much of its success to becoming a leader in USB Power Delivery- (USB-PD) compatible accessories. It also now has a line in MagSafe-compatible products, as well as new type-C devices.
India is currently working on a comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation to regulate the digital assets market in the country which may lead to an outright Bitcoin ban. The final say will be on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Twitter account was hacked to announce India accepts Bitcoin as legal tender immediately after his comments that India should "jointly shape global norms for emerging technologies like social media and cryptocurrencies so that they are used to empower democracy, not to undermine it
The Chinese government strictly enforces recent bans in regard to cryptomining and financial transactions involving cryptocurrencies, and it has now caught and punished one of its own officials who allegedly accepted bribes from cryptominers and thereby violated the new laws multiple times.
Dune: Spice Wars is a new real-time strategy game with 4X elements coming in early 2022. The game takes place in the Dune universe and will draw heavily from Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel as well as the expanded Dune media. The title will be available for purchase in Early Access next year.
LG has reportedly delayed its first 42-inch OLED panels, extending the wait for smaller OLED TVs. The South Korean company announced that it would manufacture 42-inch OLED panels this year, but this now been delayed until 2022.
The release of the highly anticipated remastered versions of GTA 3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas is a huge disappointment for many fans. Rockstar Games has now even stopped selling the PC version of the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition due to technical issues with the official Rockstar Launcher.
An industry insider (RalphsValve) has heard that Rockstar is planning to remaster Grand Theft Auto 4. The game will be launched for all major platforms sometime in 2023. It will be single-player only and include content from the 'Episodes from Liberty City' DLC pack.
The HiRes certified FC5 USB DAC/headphone amp by HiBy supports MQA and features a 4.4 mm balanced output with 125 mW output power. The hardware inside the sleek metal body of the FC5 includes the ES9281 Pro DAC, dual ES9603Q headphone amps, hardware volume controls, as well as RGB lights.
The new entries in two of Activision Blizzard's popular franchises will now be released in 2023 at the earliest after changes in personnel have delayed the development of Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2.
Microsoft has quietly brought GTA San Andreas - The Definitive Edition to Xbox Game Pass subscribers on the same day as the US$59.99 trilogy goes on sale. While the game is not free on PlayStation, GTA III will be from early next month.
Modder Digital Dreams recently posted a YouTube video showcasing Forza Horizon 5 running with ray-tracing enabled in gameplay sections, via a Cheat Engine tweak. While system specs weren't given, it appears that Digital Dreams is running the gain at a fairly locked 60 FPS.
Hopper is most likely to be a compute-only architecture, as the upcoming RTX 4000 GPUs are expected to be based on Ada Lovelace. Nvidia is probably taping out Hopper this soon in order to have everything ready by mid-2022 when Intel's Xe-HPC and AMD's CDNA2 are supposed to hit the market. Hopper is Nvidia's first attempt at a multi-chip-module design and is rumored to be produced on the 5 nm nodes from TSMC.
Previous leaks were already suggesting that the RDNA3 GPUs should be more than twice as fast as the current RX 6800 XT models thanks to the multi-chip module approach, but fresh rumors now claim that the impressive raster and ray tracing performance of the RDNA3 is also enabled through a massive increase in Infinity Cache memory capacity.
Twitter user @Redfire75369 discovered a research paper on using low-precision GPU compute for deep learning with GPU-N. The mystery card appears to be a single-die GH100 NVIDIA Hopper GPU, offering a mammoth 779 TFLOPs of FP16 compute.
