NVIDIA Next-Gen GPUs Appear In HWiNFO 64 But Are They Turing Or Volta?
At this stage of the game, barely a day goes by without a juicy rumor focused on NVIDIA's next-generation Turing GPUs for consumers. Today is not one of those quiet days. The latest rumor traces to HWiNFO, a popular piece of diagnostic software. HWiNFO posted the release notes for its latest version (5.86), and in are references to a couple of unreleased GPUs.
The release notes state that support has been added for NVIDIA's GV102 and GV104 GPUs, neither of which are out yet. So, we have official confirmation of Turing, right? Well, not so fast. There are a couple of things to note here, the first of which is this information comes from HWiNFO and not NVIDIA directly. However, that does make this leak a bit more reliable than most to this point.
What makes this so interesting, though, are the GPU names. NVIDIA is widely expected to launch its Turing GPUs very soon, perhaps by the end of this month or, if recent rumors are to be believed, at the end of next month once its hardware partners clear out existing Pascal inventories. The GV102 and GV104 labels might be Turing, but they could also be Volta.
At first glance, they would actually appear to be new Volta GPUs and not actually Turing, based on the model names. Volta already exists in the professional space, as NVIDIA's Tesla V100 accelerator packs an appropriately named GV100 GPU underneath the hood. Same goes for the Titan V. The GV102 and GV104 labels certainly add some intrigue to the situation.
There are a few different scenarios that could explain this. One is that HWiINFO is out of the loop and wanted to generate some buzz for its utility. That seems unlikely to us, but it's possible. Another possible explanation is that NVIDIA is intentionally throwing the press and Internet detectives off its trail by intentionally mislabeling its GPUs for the time being.
Yet another explanation is that NVIDIA is keeping things simple, which could be the case if its next-generation consumer cards are basically Volta without the Tensor Cores. It was only a few months when reports had Turing as the name for crypto-specific GPUs, but that later shifted to include gaming cards as well.
It's hard to say because we don't have any official information from NVIDIA at this point. All we know is that we are getting close to a new batch of GPUs and cards. Hopefully they will finally arrive within the next few weeks so we can finally put all this speculation to rest.
