Moving from 28 nm to 14/16 nm required moving from planar transistors to finfet, a pretty big difference. The differences in terms of GPU design between 16 to 10 isn't so big, so moving volta from 10 to 16 shouldn't be a big deal. The reason most likely has to do with 10 nm is still a ways off in the die sizes required for high performance GPUs.
The reason why Nvidia is moving Volta to 16 nm from 10 is... abandoning 10 nm process. Same story as Maxwell/Pascal on 20 nm. After Kepler it was supposed that Maxwell will be next gen architecture from Nvidia, and after that directly there will be... Volta. Maxwell was supposed to be 20 nm GPU. Process failed, so Nvidia had to put Pascal in between Maxwell and Volta. Same thing will happen with Volta. Expect that Volta will be slightly tuned GP100 architecture, rather than completely new architecture, because of this very reason.
We will be hearing much more about 10 nm processes in upcoming months. And I am wondering why Intel is also adding 4th refresh of their 14nm CPU lineup. Maybe for the exact same reasons.
Stacc said:
This is no longer true. GTX 1070s and 1080s aren't hard to find now, and the GTX 1060 is catching up pretty quick.
The reason for this is high-end market got fed with GPUs, and Mainstream is completely dominated by sales of AMD GPUs. Current estimations suggest that for each one 16nm GPU Nvidia sold from May, AMD sold five(!) 14nm GPUs. And that happened in one month.
Stacc said:
Volta isn't supposed to land until 2017. That means Pascal will have a shelf life of somewhere in the range of 7 to 19 months. That seems pretty normal. Just because they have little competition currently from AMD doesn't mean that they are going to stop designing new GPU architectures. They are trying to position their GPUs as general purpose compute machines for things like machine learning and computer vision, which means they are being threatened from not just other GPUs but CPUs and things like the Xeon Phi as well.
I know everything what you write, but this is absolutely pointless from business point of view in this case. Volta will land around April(at least first chips). So based on availability it is much lower than one full year of availability of GPU designs.
I also think that this means that GP100 architecture will go to mainstream(proper Pascal, renamed as Volta) consumers.