NVIDIA Hopper successor likely named after David BLACKWELL

NVIDIA to commemorate David Blackwell?

NVIDIA might call its next architecture Blackwell, leaked files suggest. 

We have been notified by our readers that the hacking group that had managed to access NVIDIA servers last week, has now started to share the files that were exfiltrated. According to the reader, one of the files specifically mentions ARCH_BLACKWELL, which would be a confirmation of an older rumor.

[integgpu_drvstage_reldriverscompilerassemblertoolsCudanvasmnvasm.c]

514: GLOBAL_ARCH_BLACKWELL

David Harold Blackwell (1919 – 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician specializing in statistics, game theory and information theory. Blackwell received twelve honorary doctorates from Universities such as Harvard and Yale.

It should be mentioned that this is not the first time we learn about Blackwell, as supposed architecture name. This name had already appeared back in July 2021 when a known NVIDIA leaker – Kopite7Kimi – mentioned it in one of his tweets.

What is not entirely clear at this moment is whether Blackwell is a successor to Hopper or Lovelace, as both architecture appear this year. Kopite suggested that it might be Ampere Next Next though, which would imply Hopper successor and data-center oriented product series.

Please note, we have not independently confirmed this leak as we have not downloaded the leaked files.

Update: We received further information which might confirm Blackwell GB100 and GB102 GPU codenames.

Many thanks to Cassini for the tip!