NVIDIA prepares to make its annual tech expo, the 2018 Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) action-packed. The company already surprised us with its next-generation "Volta" architecture based TITAN V graphics card priced at 3 grand; and is working to cash in on the crypto-currency wave and ease pressure on consumer graphics card inventories by designing highly optimized mining accelerators under the new Turing brand. There's now talk that NVIDIA could pole-vault launch of the "Volta" architecture for the consumer-space; by unveiling a GeForce graphics card based on its succeeding architecture, "Ampere."

The oldest reports of NVIDIA unveiling "Ampere" date back to November 2017. At the time it was expected that NVIDIA will only share some PR blurbs on some of the key features it brings to the table, or at best, unveil a specialized (non-gaming) silicon, such as a Drive or machine-learning chip. An Expreview report points at the possibility of a GeForce product, one that you can buy in your friendly neighborhood PC store and play games with. The "Ampere" based GPU will still be based on the 12 nanometer silicon fabrication process at TSMC, and is unlikely to be a big halo chip with exotic HBM stacks. Why NVIDIA chose to leapfrog is uncertain. GTC gets underway late-March.