NVIDIA CEO Claims Next-Gen GeForce Turing GPUs Are Coming 'A Long Time From Now'
The million dollar question on every gamer's mind is when the heck will NVIDIA finally launch its next-generation GPU, presumably called Turing. There have been plenty of rumors and speculation, most of which point to this summer. However, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang may have thrown cold water on the chatter when he said at Computex that the next generation of GeForce will not arrive for a long while.
If you listen closely, you can hear the collective groan of gamers who are anxious to see NVIDIA finally put its Pascal architecture in the rear view mirror as it hits the ground running with a new architecture. The good news in that regard is that Jensen's answer is not exactly clear, and could mean several different things. It came during a question and answer session at a press conference when someone in the crowd asked when the next generation of GeForce will arrive.
Jensen initially danced around the question, perhaps uninterested in answering, or maybe teasing what is sure to be a big launch. The question almost went unanswered, until someone else in the crowd asked for "a little hint." Jensen's response was, "It's a long time from now," as he waved his hand in the air. You can hear it for yourself in the embedded video above (starting at the 1hr47m10s mark), though you'll need to crank up the volume to hear him.
It's not immediately clear how Jensen's latest official update aligns with recent rumors. It depends on multiple factors, such as what he considers to be a long time from now, and whether he's referring to market availability or the initial launch, the two of which do not always match up.
A little over two weeks ago, it was rumored that NVIDIA would launch its GeForce GTX 1180 in Founders Edition form in July, followed by custom cooled variants by its hardware partners in August or September. More recently, it was discovered that NVIDIA's Stuart Oberman was on the schedule to discuss "NVIDIA's Next Generation Mainstream GPU" at the Hot Chips symposium on August 20.
It's still possible that NVIDIA could announce something in July, then talk about it in August, with or without market availability. Jensen's comment, however, seems to indicate that the Consumer Electronics Show (or thereabouts) is a more likely time frame for the GeForce GTX 1180. While we're still in the dark, our best guess at this point is that we're look at late 2018 or early 2019 for actual availability.
