There have been many reports that Nvidia?s next generation technology will be codenamed Ampere and we want to set one thing straight. The successor of Volta is an AI/ML chip and not a GPU - just like Volta never was.
Many will jump the gun and say well, Volta did ship as a Titan V for $2999 and you can perform cryptocurrency mining with it really well. Since this is HBM 2, and an extremely big core, Nvidia could never bring this to a reasonable $750ish market and would struggle to sell Titan V even at $1,000.
Nvidia wanted to address the Founders/Titan prosumers market and offer them a very fast GPU and that is what Volta is. Volta, as you know by now, shines in machine learning and artificial intelligence thanks to optimized architecture and a bunch of specialized tensor cores. It would made a hell of a GPU but big chunks of the Volta won't do anything for graphics acceleration as they are, quite simply, hardwired for AI tasks. Since Nvidia knows that some people are willing to spend $2,999 to get the Volta for research, it kick-started this market. Nvidia has always been well known for making people pay a ridiculous amount of money for pinnacle technology as Jensen loves the incredible high margins.
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