NVIDIA Hopper Architecture will be succeeded by its Blackwell Architecture

Videocardz has obtained information from NVIDIA's recent hack, which appears to confirm not only the successor to Hopper GPUs but also the standard GPU name. NVIDIA was assumed to have…

By Nivedita Bangari

March 1, 2022

2 min read

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Videocardz has obtained information from NVIDIA’s recent hack, which appears to confirm not only the successor to Hopper GPUs but also the standard GPU name. NVIDIA was assumed to have previously revealed all of the available codenames for their following GPUs, but it appears that Jensen was prepared for another surprise. The replacement of NVIDIA’s planned Hopper GPUs has been given the codename Blackwell, after David Blackwell.

Following is a short bio taken from the Wikipedia page of Dr. David Blackwell.

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first black tenured faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Because the Blackwell GPU series is currently nothing more than a text string, not much is known (obviously). All we know is that this series will most likely come after the Hopper GPUs (which will be released in parallel with Lovelace GPUs). It’s also plausible that this name relates to the Hopper replacement rather than consumer GPUs.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Blackwell about NVIDIA. Kopite, a well-known NVIDIA leaker who may or may not be Jensen in disguise, tweeted about the mathematician about a year ago and is credited with disclosing the nomenclature:

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) pic.twitter.com/A8v5VsKKj0
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 4, 2021

With the next Lovelace and Hopper GPUs, NVIDIA is returning to TSMC and leaving Samsung, and the Blackwell GPUs are very certainly going to be the same. By that time, NVIDIA will likely release the first MCM constructions. Thus, Blackwell GPUs could be MCM in.