AIBs expected to receive first NVIDIA 'Turing' GPUs by early September, likely to be called the GeForce GTX 1180

The first NVIDIA 'Turing' GPUs are expected to land in Add-in Board (AIB) partners' hands by late August or early September according to a report by Wccftech. While the nomenclature of the cards is yet to be confirmed, it is being learnt that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is leaning towards the GeForce GTX 11xx series instead of a GeForce GTX 20xx series, with the flagship card likely to be called the GeForce GTX 1180.

The AIBs are expected to receive low initial shipment volumes (as low as 150-300 GPUs per AIB), possibly to design their cards around the new design. The low initial supply could mean that prices during launch time could be considerably higher than the MSRP. Of course, prices will normalize in due course of time when shipment volumes increase. Therefore, expect GPUs to be commercially available around Q4 2018 or in the event of any issues, Q1 2019 at best. It's not like NVIDIA is really under threat from AMD Radeon anyways — at least not until 'Navi' debuts later in 2019. Also, although a bit more realistic now, street prices for NVIDIA's current 'Pascal' GPUs are still higher than the MSRP due to the rise in GPU-based cryptocurrency mining. Thus, NVIDIA and its AIB partners are in no rush to replace the current generation anytime soon.

While news of a possible new GPU arrival is music to ears for the fans, the report still has to be taken with a tinge of skepticism. We have been hearing several contradictory reports regarding NVIDIA 'Turing' all the time. Right from Mr. Huang himself declaring that the next NVIDIA gaming GPUs are 'a long way off' to several tell-tale signs from sources associated with the matter that a Q3-Q4 2018 launch is imminent, we've seen them all. The mobility versions of the new NVIDIA GPU are also expected to follow the desktop launch shortly and are slated to be available towards the end of 2018. 

TSMC is said to be ramping up production of 7nm GPUs for NVIDIA along the lines of AMD's new 7nm Vega. This might not be a sure shot indication that 'Turing' may be based on 7nm (our guess is as good as your's regarding this) unlike the current 'Volta', which is based on TSMC's 12nm FinFET for NVIDIA (FFN) process. It, however, does imply that NVIDIA will make the eventual transition to 7nm next year starting with high performance compute GPUs and then distilling that to consumer cards. Hopefully, AMD's 7nm 'Navi' will be ready by then to make for some interesting competition.

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