IT Home reported on December 19 that the former AI star Tegra X**ier processor will be disgraced, and Nvidia announced that it will stop supporting its Linux system. This means that just six years after its release, the X**ier with Arm cores and Volta architecture GPUs is officially a historical relic. And for the future of other Volta-based GPUs, this may also be a wake-up call.
According to IT House, the X**Ier, released in 2018, was once a rising star in NVIDIA's Tegra product line, with its powerful Volta graphics processor, which was born for robotics and other artificial intelligence applications. X**ier actually comes in two versions: T194 and NX, with T194 being the full version and NX castrating some CPU and GPU cores. While Nvidia only mentions "Tegra194" this time, it's likely that the NX is also included, given that it's essentially a stripped-down version of the T194.
Intriguingly, among the many Tegra chips, the relatively new X**ier was the first to be eliminated, while some of the older models remained strong. The reason for this is likely that the Volta architecture used by X**ier is not as popular as other architectures. For example, the X1 was successfully powered on the Nintendo Switch console, while the X2 followed the mantle of the X1 with a Pascal architecture that was quite similar to the X1's Maxwell architecture.
With the exception of X**ier, the Volta architecture was only a flash in the pan in the server and professional graphics space. The Tesla V100 and Titan V in 2017, the Quadro **100 in 2018, and the CMP 100HX mining GPU in 2022 are pretty much all of them. In 2018, the introduction of the Turing architecture made Volta's situation even worse. While Volta has faster HBM2 memory and more Tensor cores than Turing, it lacks hardware-accelerated ray tracing and is more expensive to produce.
In 2020, the advent of Ampere architecture completely sentenced Volta to death. While Volta still has more Tensor cores than Ampere's flagship GPUs, its maximum VRAM of 32GB is already stretched thin, and TSMC's aging 12nm process is hard to compete with Ampere, not to mention the lagging CUDA core architecture and missing ray tracing support.
Given Volta's marginal position in Nvidia's business, it wasn't easy for the company to support it for so long. But the retirement of the X**ier may indicate that other Volta GPUs will not escape the same fate.