Rumor | Nvidia GTX 11xx series could come with 7 nm chips instead of 12 nm, launching late November

The anticipation surrounding the launch of the GTX 11xx series from Nvidia is causing specs and benchmarks to appear out of thin air, while the rumor mill is churning info at peak speeds. Sure, with no real sources to back up all the recent rumors and leaks, anyone can come up with some plausible numbers derived from the Volta specs, pack them up in a pretty table or graph and call it legit data from insider sources. No need to point fingers here, but what if all the current predictions about the July-August launch of the GTX 11xx series using 12 nm Turing chips based on the Volta architecture are off? Like off by 3-4 months and… say 5 nm?

A user named NV Gfx Prgmr over at Overclockers UK forum came up with an interesting rumor, which postulates that Nvidia will actually skip the 12 nm stepping altogether and release 7 nm GPUs in November this year. While the rumor could appear to be sarcastic towards the current state of the rumor mill, it actually makes sense if analyzed in a broader sense. TSMC is already rolling out all sorts of memory, processor and GPU chips manufactured on the 7 nm stepping, and AMD already announced the 7 nm Vega 20 machine learning GPU scheduled for late 2018. Is Nvidia going to launch 12 nm GPUs and soon enough ditch them for 7 nm versions in early 2019?

Presumably, AMD is not going to launch 7 nm gaming GPUs before 2019 itself, and, knowing that Nvidia is all about getting ahead of its competitor, the green company might opt to get on the 7 nm bandwagon as soon as possible, even though TSMC will not have the extreme ultra-violet tech for improved energy efficiency and die size reduction ready by November this year. Also, Nvidia’s release schedule is largely based on a 2-year cycle, so a short-lived 12 nm GPU looks like a bad idea compared to the 7 nm design that is said to stick around for around 2 years.

There also is that official confirmation from the Gigabyte UK representative that said Nvidia would be launching the next gen mobile GPUs by the end of 2018. It is true that the mobility variants usually get launched a few months after the desktop models, but what if Nvidia is changing the release schedule this year?

E3 and Computex are right around the corner, so we will see what is going to happen there, but if Nvidia does not announce anything regarding the next gen GPUs by then, the 7 nm scenario will most likely take precedence.

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