Volta (microarchitecture)
Volta is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, succeeding Pascal. It was first announced on a roadmap in March 2013, although the first product was not announced until May 2017. The architecture is named after 18th–19th century Italian chemist and physicist Alessandro Volta. It was NVIDIA's first chip to feature Tensor Cores, specially designed cores that have superior deep learning performance over regular CUDA cores. The architecture is produced with TSMC's 12 nm FinFET process. The Ampere microarchitecture is the successor to Volta. The first graphics card to use it was the datacenter  Tesla V100, e.g. as part of the Nvidia DGX-1 system. It has also been used in the Quadro GV100 and Titan V. There were no mainstream GeForce graphics cards based on Volta. Details. Architectural improvements of the Volta architecture include the following: Products. Volta has been announced as the GPU microarchitecture within the Xavier generation of Tegra SoC focusing on self-driving cars. At Nvidia's annual GPU Technology Conference keynote on May 10, 2017, Nvidia officially announced the Volta microarchitecture along with the Tesla V100. The Volta GV100 GPU is built on a 12 nm process size using HBM2  memory with 900 GB/s of bandwidth. Nvidia officially announced the NVIDIA TITAN V on December 7, 2017. Nvidia officially announced the Quadro GV100 on March 27, 2018. Application. Volta is also reported to be included in the Summit and Sierra supercomputers, used for GPGPU compute. The Volta GPUs will connect to the POWER9 CPUs via NVLink 2.0, which is expected to support cache coherency and therefore improve GPGPU performance.