NVIDIA's "Einstein" architecture was a real project

Although it has never been an official NVIDIA code name for roadmaps, the name "Einstein" has been rumored a few times earlier in the decade. According to rumors, Einstein would be the architecture that would follow Maxwell in the NVIDIA lineup. And while we have unfortunately not found anything new on NVIDIA's future roadmap at this year's show – nor on any sign of Ampere or other 7nm chips – I inadvertently discovered that Rumors about Einstein were true. At least, from a certain point of view.

In discussing this morning with the NVIDIA research group some of their latest projects (more on this later this week when I have time), the group was talking about previous research projects. And it turns out that one of those earlier research projects was Einstein.

Rather than being an unfounded rumor, Einstein was actually a real project at NVIDIA. However, rather than being an architecture, it was a search GPU on which the NVIDIA research group was working. And although this research project did not bear fruit under the name Einstein, it did it under another name much more well known: Volta.

So, even if that means we can remove Einstein from the list of names of potential future NVIDIA architectures, the project itself was real and it was a great success for NVIDIA. As Einstein became the architecture of the Volta, it became the cornerstone of what is now all the GPUs of NVIDIA's current generation of servers and clients. This includes both the normal Volta and its optimized derivative for graphics, Turing.