NVIDIA planning a 7nm GPU before year-end

DigiTimes reiterates the story that video card sales are expected to face difficulties in the second half of this year due to much lower demand from the cryptocurrency mining market. Current word on the street is that NVIDIA is expected to roll out its first new card towards the end of August, this will be the GeForce GTX 1180, a card with a 12nm GPU fabbed by TSMC.

The GTX 1170 is expected to follow late September and the GeForce GTX 1160 is reportedly scheduled a month later. As always, take this information with a grain of salt as we can't verify the accuracy, and these plans are subject to change.

The rollout of the cards will depend on the inventory levels of the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. Due to the sudden cooldown of the crypto market, there's a lot of inventory of these cards and that's reportedly one of the reasons why NVIDIA delayed its next-gen cards.

Pricing of the next-gen cards is believed to be higher than before, in effort to create differentiation:

With the prices of the current-generation graphics cards to remain at high levels, the next-generation devices are likely to be priced even higher in order to create differentiation, but this will also deter demand for the new cards, the sources noted.

Graphics card sales are expected to be significantly undermined in the second half as demand from cryptocurrency miners has been declining, while consumers in the gaming area will continue to wait for prices to drop. With some miners having already begun selling their second-hand graphics cards in the PC DIY channels, demand for new cards is expected to be weakened further.

Last but not least, DigiTimes heard whispers that NVIDIA is planning to release its first 7nm GPU at the end of 2018. No word about whether this will be a consumer part, or something for the machine learning market like AMD's 7nm Vega.