Nvidia wants to announce its next-generation GPU architecture, codenamed Lovelace. Nvidia will likely detail it at GTC 2022 in September, and CEO Jensen Huang hinted at the announcement during a recent earnings call with the company.
“We’ll get through this over the next few months and go into next year with our new architecture,” said Huang, discussing the slowing demand for gaming GPUs. “I look forward to telling you more about it at GTC next month.”
The announcement of the new GPU architecture doesn’t mean that users will immediately see RTX 40 series GPUs. Nvidia first unveiled its Ampere architecture for data centers and then a few months later released RTX 30 series cards for consumers. There is always a slight delay between the announcement of the architecture and the release of consumer GPUs. In the case of the RTX 20 series, that delay was only a week, so it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to wait a few months.
In any case, Nvidia is rumored to be working on the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 GPUs. The most powerful RTX 4090 is rumored to be released in July, and it could provide a significant performance boost over existing RTX 3090 and even RTX 3090 Ti cards.
The reason why the RTX 30 and 40-series will likely be able to coexist is that Nvidia has built too many GPUs. The company is now having to adjust retail prices due to excess inventory. The RTX 30 series cards recently appeared at MSRP, after being priced by resellers 2 to 3 times over the years. The collapse in cryptocurrencies has impacted demand for GPUs, and the excess inventory makes it difficult to predict when Nvidia will put its RTX 40 series cards in stores.
The Nvidia GTC 2022 conference is scheduled for Sept. 19-22, and Jensen Huang’s keynote set is scheduled for Sept. 20 at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET. “I look forward to next month’s GTC conference, where we will share new advances of RTX reinventing 3D graphics in gaming, AI’s continuing breakthroughs, and building the metaverse, the next evolution of the Internet,” Huang says.
