NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in a pre-GTC press briefing stressed that the upcoming "Ampere" graphics architecture will spread across both the company's compute-accelerator and commercial graphics product lines. The architecture makes its debut later today with the Tesla A100 HPC processor for breakthrough AI acceleration. It's unlikely that any GeForce products will be formally announced this month, with rumors pointing to a GeForce "Ampere" product launch at a gaming-focused event in September, close to "Cyberpunk 2077" launch.



It was earlier believed that NVIDIA had forked its breadwinning IP into two lines, one focused on headless scalar compute, and the other on graphics products through the company's GeForce and Quadro product lines. To that effect, its "Volta" architecture focused on scalar-compute (with the exception of the forgotten TITAN V); and the "Turing" architecture focused solely on GeForce and Quadro. It was then believed that "Ampere" will focus on compute, and the so-called "Hopper" would be this generation's graphics-focused architecture. We now know that won't be the case. We've compiled a selection of GeForce Ampere rumors in this article.

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NVIDIA Tesla A100 "Ampere" AIC (add-in card) Form-Factor Board Pictured
Here's the first picture of a Tesla A100 "Ampere" AIC (add-in card) form-factor board, hot on the heals of the morning big A100 reveal. The AIC card is a bare PCB, which workstation builders will add compatible cooling solutions on. The PCB features the gigantic GA100 processor with its six HBM2E stacks, in the center, surrounded by VRM components, and I/O on three sides. On the bottom side, you will find a conventional PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface. Above it, are NVLink fingers. The rear I/O has high-bandwidth network interfaces (likely 200 Gbps InfiniBand), by Mellanox. The tail end has hard points for 12 V power input. Find juicy details of the GA100 in our older article.

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MSI B550 Motherboard Lineup Hits the Radar
MSI registered five new motherboard SKUs with the Eurasian Economic Commission, based on the AMD B550 chipset. The five new socket AM4 motherboards cover a wide range of sub-$200 (expected) price-points. The lineup is led by the MSI Performance Gaming (MPG) B550 Gaming Carbon WiFi, which was part of AMD's chipset reveal presentation; followed closely by the MPG B550 Gaming Edge WiFi, its Mini-ITX sibling, the MPG B550I Gaming Edge WiFi; the MSI Arsenal Gaming (MAG) B550M Mortar WiFi; and the B550M PRO-VDH in the entry-level. The lineup is missing a "MAG B550 Tomahawk," possibly because MSI wants to launch it later. The company launched its MAG X570 Tomahawk rather recently, and probably still has inventories of its popular B450 Tomahawk MAX motherboard launched with large 32 MB BIOS ROM chips. AMD and its motherboard partners are expected to launch B550 chipset motherboard in mid-June, 2020.

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ASUS Expects a Massive 30% Surge in Notebook Shipments in Q2-2020
With the COVID-19 global pandemic forcing entire payrolls to work from home, the demand for pre-built computers handed out by companies, or those purchased by workers at their own expense, has hit an all time high. ASUS expects a massive 30% surge in notebook shipments in Q2-2020, with Q1 having mopped up inventories across the globe. For Q1-2020, ASUS reported $2.12 billion in revenues, down 28.27% sequentially, and 23.3% YoY. ASUS expects that the surge in notebook sales started toward the end of March, and could go on until June.

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(PR) ASUS Announces the W480 Workstation Series
ASUS today announced the W480 series workstation motherboard and workstation system designed to showcase the full potential of the latest Intel Xeon W-1200 processors. The ASUS W480 workstation series is the ideal choice for small-to-medium businesses and content creators seeking workstations delivering essential performance along with professional-grade reliability and security at a budget friendly price.



Teamed up with the latest Intel Xeon W-1200 processors featuring up to 10 cores, 20 threads, 5.3 GHz clock speeds, and 125 W and 128 GB DDR4-2933 ECC memory support, the ASUS W480 workstation series is purpose-built for 2D/3D CAD applications. The ASUS W480 workstation series also supports ASUS Control Center Express and ASUS Control Center, two versions of enterprise-grade IT monitoring and management software that simplify IT operations and improve productivity with comprehensive control and intuitive functionality.
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NVIDIA Ampere A100 Has 54 Billion Transistors, World's Largest 7nm Chip
Not long ago, Intel's Raja Koduri claimed that the Xe HP "Ponte Vecchio" silicon was the "big daddy" of Xe GPUs, and the "largest chip co-developed in India," larger than the 35 billion-transistor Xilinix VU19P FPGA co-developed in the country. It turns out that NVIDIA is in the mood for setting records. The "Ampere" A100 silicon has 54 billion transistors crammed into a single 7 nm die (not counting transistor counts of the HBM2E memory stacks).



NVIDIA claims a 20 Times boost in both AI inference and single-precision (FP32) performance over its "Volta" based predecessor, the Tesla V100. The chip also offers a 2.5X gain in FP64 performance over "Volta." NVIDIA has also invented a new number format for AI compute, called TF32 (tensor float 32). TF32 uses 10-bit mantissa of FP16, and the 8-bit exponent of FP32, resulting in a new, efficient format. NVIDIA attributes its 20x performance gains over "Volta" to this. The 3rd generation tensor core introduced with Ampere supports FP64 natively. Another key design focus for NVIDIA is to leverage the "sparsity" phenomenon in neural nets, to reduce their size, and improve performance.
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NVIDIA Tesla A100 GPU Pictured
Thanks to the sources of VideoCardz, we now have the first picture of the next-generation NVIDIA Tesla A100 graphics card. Designed for computing oriented applications, the Tesla A100 is a socketed GPU designed for NVIDIA's proprietary SXM socket. In a post few days ago, we were suspecting that you might be able to fit the Tesla A100 GPU in the socket of the previous Volta V100 GPUs as it is a similar SXM socket. However, the mounting holes have been re-arranged and this one requires a new socket/motherboard. The Tesla A100 GPU is based on GA100 GPU die, which we don't know specifications of. From the picture, we can only see that there is one very big die attached to six HBM modules, most likely HBM2E. Besides that everything else is unknown. More details are expected to be announced today at the GTC 2020 digital keynote.
NVIDIA Tesla A100

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