As per a VideoCardz report, Nvidia recently registered the Hopper trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The latest filing lends credence to the possibility that Hopper is the codename for the successor to Nvidia's upcoming Ampere graphics card architecture.
Ampere, which is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère, will replace the chipmaker's current Turing architecture. Both Samsung and TSMC will produce Ampere for Nvidia on the 7nm process node. There is no concrete launch date yet, but Ampere is expected to debut in 2020. Nvidia's filing suggests that Hopper will arrive after Ampere.
Little is known about Hopper at this time. There is speculation that Nvidia chose the name to pay homage to American computer scientist Grace Hopper. Rumors also point to Hopper being a MCM (multi-chip module) architecture, which probably means it won't be a GeForce gaming graphics card. That would mean we'd likely find Hopper inside Nvidia's Tesla or Quadro products.
Next year could be a very interesting year for graphics cards if rumors are true. Nvidia is expected to bring Ampere to market, and there are whispers that AMD is preparing its next-generation RDNA 2-based graphics cards with ray tracing support, a feature only Nvidia graphics cards currently have. Let's not forget that Intel is also gearing up its Xe graphics cards for 2020 as well.
