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It is finished, at least the R&D. The GTX 10xx cards are based on Pascal, since which we've had Volta and now Turing. Both Volta and Turing have only been used in workstation and server class cards. There are a few things in play. - Nvidia has no competition in the consumer graphics card space; AMD is so far behind that Nvidia can release a (completely amazing) architecture in 2016 and have it still be top of class. - Consumer graphics demands are still pretty much met with Pascal, though this could be a chicken/egg problem. 4K monitors are pricey, and >60fps 4K has only now just entering the market, and even then a 1080Ti can drive it alright. At every other resolution, you get a 1070, 1070Ti, or a 1080 and you're set. The demand isn't there on the high-end, the only thing a new arch would help is delivering better performance at a cheaper price. - Every non-consumer application of GPGPUs is exploding. Rendering, AI, Cloud, they all need silicon, and every wafer you "waste" in the low margin consumer segment is a wafer that could have went to one of these markets. I mean, its not that simple, but that's the idea. - The one consumer use that is exploding (less so today, but in months past) is crypto mining, which is highly volatile. Nvidia likely doesn't want to encourage this use. You've got miners in China buying up thousands of consumer cards, and whenever crypto crashes they enter the used market, driving down demand for first party cards. - Much of the rest of the consumer markets are surprisingly dominated by AMD. AMD has consoles and Mac on lockdown. A lot of this is because Nvidia has always been unwilling to play in this space, but let's say you're senior leadership at Nvidia. You have two choices: Play with Apple and ship silicon in the Mac even though Apple themselves clearly isn't committed to the platform, or play with Amazon, Microsoft, etc and ship silicon to the datacenter, which Mac users will often end up using anyway (AI, cloud rendering, etc). And hey, you want that local processing power, just use Windows. No brainer. My guess is that they'll keep Pascal alive for 2018 to clear out inventory, and we'll see a line of Volta-based consumer cards in 2019. The want to establish a completely solid moat in these high growth markets before fishing for pennies in the consumer markets with their older established architectures. |