NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture Will Succeed Hopper, and GB100 and GB102 GPUs Have Been Confirmed

NOTE: This article is originally from February 28th 2022

Videocardz obtained information from NVIDIA’s recent hack, which appears to confirm not only the successor of Hopper GPUs, but also the standard GPU nomenclature. NVIDIA was thought to have revealed all possible codenames for their upcoming GPUs, but Jensen appears to have planned another surprise. The successor to NVIDIA’s upcoming Hopper GPUs has been given the codename Blackwell, after David Blackwell.

An array of influential scientists, mathematicians and physicists that NVIDIA revealed as potential candidates for internal GPU codenames.

The Blackwell GPU series is currently unknown (due to the fact that it is nothing more than a string of text). All we know is that this series will most likely follow the Hopper GPUs (which are going to be released in parallel with Lovelace GPUs). It’s also possible that this terminology refers to the Hopper successor rather than consumer GPUs.

The text string discovered in the dump is also provided below (courtesy of Videocardz):

[integgpu_drvstage_reldriverscompilerassemblertoolsCudanvasmnvasm.c]

514: GLOBAL_ARCH_BLACKWELL

Surprisingly, this is not the first time we’ve heard of Blackwell in relation to NVIDIA. Kopite, a well-known NVIDIA leaker who may be Jensen in disguise (I’m just kidding…. or am I?) tweeted about the mathematician almost a year ago and can be blamed for the leak.

NVIDIA is returning to TSMC and leaving Samsung with its upcoming Lovelace and Hopper GPUs, and the Blackwell GPUs are very likely to be the same. NVIDIA will also have likely introduced the first MCM constructs by then, so Blackwell GPUs could be MCM in nature (although this is pure speculation on my part).