NVIDIA CEO Says No Rush on 7nm GPU; Company Clearing Its Crypto Chip Inventory

NVIDIA CEO and Co-Founder Jensen Huang says a rumored next-generation GPU architecture is not a priority for the company, and that he remains optimistic about clearing the chip inventory built up for cryptocurrency mining. Huang made the remarks in a press conference Tuesday at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Santa Clara.

Rumors are swirling around NVIDIA’s next-generation 7nm GPU architecture, codenamed “Ampere”. Since rival AMD recently unveiled its 7nm CPUs for data centres and 7nm GPUs for consumer-grade graphic cards, Wall Street analysts expect NVIDIA to speed up its next-generation semiconductor design. However, NVIDIA Co-Founder and CEO Jensen Huang stayed silent on Ampere in his Monday keynote speech at GTC.

Huang said NVIDIA is currently putting a major focus on Turing, the GPU architecture the company released last year that introduces ray tracing and AI capability to real-time graphics.

Huang told Synced NVIDIA is in no rush to mass produce 7nm GPUs because he has sufficient confidence in Turing. “What makes us special is we can create the most energy-efficient GPU in the world at anytime, and we should use the most affordable technology. Look at Turing. The energy-efficiency is so good even compared to somebody else’s 7nm.”

NVIDIA’s enterprise-grade GPUs running on the Turing architecture have been well-received. Amazon and Google recently announced they will deploy NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs on their cloud platforms in the coming weeks. Mainstream servers optimized to run NVIDIA’s data science acceleration software and featuring Tesla T4 GPUs, are now available from seven of the world’s largest systems manufacturers, including Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Inspur, Lenovo and Sugon.

Sales of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2070 however have been lower than expected according to Q4 FY19 earnings reports. Huang explained that leftover GPU inventory from the cryptocurrency market impacted the sales of RTX chips: “When we first came to the market and announced the product I had so much inventory for crypto. I cannot bring the whole family [of RTX chips]!”

Huang said NVIDIA is now moving on as the GPU inventory for cryptocurrency is “largely over now.” A Bloomberg story confirms NVIDIA is expected to clear out its crypto GPU inventory in the current quarter, and maintains an optimistic forecast for fiscal 2020.

Journalist: Tony Peng | Editor: Michael Sarazen