NVIDIA Hopper multi-chip-module GPU close to tapeout?

Word is going out that NVIDIA's Hopper GPU is close to tapeout. The source of this news is Greymon55, a new Twitter account of a leaker who previously leaked AMD roadmaps. Hopper has been under development for quite some time now, it's NVIDIA's first shot at creating a multi-chip-module (MCM) design. If the chip is close to taping out, this means it could hit the market around mid-2022.

It's not for gaming

We still know little about Hopper. It's believed this architecture will be made on a 5nm node from TSMC. The GPU architecture will be quite different, it's rumored to get two dies with 288 streaming multiprocessors. That's 2.6x more than the Ampere-based NVIDIA A100. At least in theory, and if NVIDIA gets the scaling right, this could result in a performance uplift of a factor of three.

Hopper will compete with the Intel Xe-HP/C and AMD CDNA2 GPUs. The first product with Hopper may be the NVIDIA H100 datacenter card.

NVIDIA's roadmap for the gaming GPU market is still clouded in mystery. The Ampere-based RTX 30 series will likely get some sort of refresh before the firm introduced the new Ada Lovelace-based generation. It's unlikely that the latter will hit the market before Hopper.