NVIDIA celebrate Alan Turing's birthday, GTX 1180 confirmed?

NVIDIA seems to be ramping up into its next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics card launch, with teases from TSMC entering 7nm production with NVIDIA as a customer, and GDDR6 going into mass production over the next few months. During Computex 2018, we heard that NVIDIA would be announcing the GTX 1180 on July 30, while AIB partners told me they would have cards on the market in August or September.

But it was a tweet by the official NVIDIA Twitter account that celebrated Alan Turing's birthday, with a quote from Turing that's interesting: "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done". Rewinding the clock to earlier this month, where NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang said that the next-gen GeForce cards were a while away, where he said: "It's a long time from now".

TSMC enters 7nm production, GDDR6 is being spun up into mass production and AMD has nothing at all for Radeon gamers until this time next year. NVIDIA is already ahead of the best AMD offers with the Radeon RX Vega 64 being absolutely dominated by the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti let alone TITAN Xp, so the launch of a new GPU would put them an entire generation and a half ahead, minimum.

If the rumors are true and we do get better-than-TITAN-Xp performance, AMD is in serious trouble with Radeon dead in the water. It won't be cheap, with prices that I've been hearing that will be between $999 and $1499, but a single graphics card that can power NVIDIA's new 4K 144Hz HDR G-Sync displays and the even more exciting Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs) that will offer a huge 65-inch panel at 4K 120Hz HDR with G-Sync.

You can't run games at 4K 144Hz on a single GTX 1080 Ti, and NVIDIA won't release a new card that eats into their current GTX 10 series as AMD has nothing to compete with the GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN Xp. This opens up the $999-$1499 market for a new GTX 1180 with 8GB of GDDR6 for around $999, and a higher-end GTX 1180 with 16GB of GDDR6 for upwards of $1499.

We will know soon enough, but expect the new GTX 11 series to be powered by Ampere while the Turing should succeed Volta in the professional/data/AI markets.