Here’s a story from early 2012 with NVIDIA takling about TSMC’s 20nm node: NVIDIA knew they wouldn’t, or at least there was a very strong possibility they wouldn’t, use the 20nm node very early on. NVIDIA is not that much ahead of AMD and Intel. No, I don’t believe that Pascal in its current form could have been released for 20nm in 2014. “It would be more accurate to say Pascal was pushed back, because Pascal is the original Maxwell design for 20nm.” The entire rumor could be crap, who knows? You would think that, especially in the latter case, they would have integrated those ideas into Maxwell and Pascal, though but, like HBM2 memory, there might have been a reason why they couldn't. Clocks could get higher, or the circuits themselves could get simpler. That is, of course, unless NVIDIA recognized ways to make the Maxwell-based architecture significantly more die-space efficient in Volta. If this is what is going on, and we're totally just speculating at the moment, it would signal that enterprise customers should expect a new GPGPU card every second gaming generation. Like GM200, however, it would also be unappealing to GPU compute users who need FP64. The rumored GP102, expected in the ~450mm 2 range for Titan or GTX 1080 Ti-style parts, has some room to grow. That said, GP100 leaves a lot of room on the table for an FP32-optimized, ~600mm 2 part to crush its performance at the high end, similar to how GM200 replaced GK110. This is quite interesting, because GPUs scale quite well with complexity changes, as they have many features with a relatively low clock rate, so the only real ways to increase performance are to make the existing architecture more efficient, or make a larger chip. Instead, it will take place on the same, 16nm node that Pascal is currently occupying. This rumor claims that NVIDIA is not trying to go with 10nm for Volta. The lattice spacing for silicon at room temperature is around ~0.5nm, so we're talking about features the size of ~the low 30s of atoms in width. Pascal caught up with 16nm, although we know that some hard, physical limitations are right around the corner. This ran into a hitch as Maxwell was delayed a year, apart from the GTX 750 Ti, and then pushed back to the same 28nm process that Kepler utilized. For the past few generations, NVIDIA has been roughly trying to release a new architecture with a new process node, and release a refresh the following year.

Fp64 ratio