Rumour mill: Nvidia to unveil refreshed GeForce GTX 20 series GPU in April

Forthcoming Nvidia 20-series graphics cards rumoured to be based on the company's new Ampere architecture

Nvidia will be unveiling a refreshed version of its GeForce GTX line-up, the 20 series, in April, according to strong new rumours.

The leak comes via German site 3D Center and, perhaps more interestingly, states that the new generation of GPUs will be based on its upcoming architecture, codenamed Ampere.

The new line-up is said to come in April, so it could be that the firm will unveil the new generation of GPUs at its GTC technology conference in San Jose, due to take place at the end of March.

If true, it will be almost two years after Nvidia unveiled the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 in Austin, Texas.

The German news site claims that TSMC has stopped production of GP102, the GPU that powers the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, meaning that current-generation GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN X graphics cards would stop being produced throughout the rest of this year to make way for the unveiling of the GTX 20 series.

If the reports are confirmed come March or April, the GTX 20 series is likely to use Nvidia's new and improved VRAM technology, which uses a smaller bus than the GTX 1080 Ti thanks to the arrival of GDDR6 memory technology.

The upcoming Ampere architecture is rumoured to be based on Samsung's 14nm process technology, after Nvidia signed an agreement with the Korean tech giant that would see the company making its new chips.

The last big GPU Nvidia unveiled was for desktop PCs and workstations that, founder and CEO Jensen Huang claimed, was "the world's most powerful GPU for the PC".

Named the Titan V, the GPU is intended not for gaming, though, but for machine-learning applications. Announced at the annual NIPS conference in December 2017, the Titan V was touted as "the world's most powerful GPU for the PC" and is designed to excel at computational processing for scientific simulation.

With 21.1 billion transistors delivering 110 teraflops of raw horsepower, it is also said to be nine times as powerful as its predecessor, and way more energy efficient thanks to being based on Nvidia's Volta GPU architecture.

It does, though, cost about $3,000.