Nvidia has confirmed that its "Pascal" GPU architecture will launch in 2016 and that its "Volta" GPU architecture succeed it in2017. Volta powered supercomputers are expected to be operational by the middle of 2017. It's Nvidia's sixth generation of General Purpose GPU architectures since the introduction of the company's first unified shader graphics architecture code named Tesla. Which debuted with the company's highly successful GeForce 8 - 8000 series - back in 2006.

Volta was originally intended to succeed Nvidia's 900 series Maxwell GPU architecture in 2016. It was originally going to be the company's first generation to feature stacked memory. However Volta was designed with HMC , the Hybrid Memory Cube, in mind. Unfortunately,HMC hadn't matured as quickly as Nvidia had hoped. So a replacement was put in place that makes use of the other major stacked memory standard avilable in the market, High Bandwidth Memory or HBM for short. And thus Pascal was born.