Remember a week or three ago when a rumor surfaced about a possible MCM prototype from NVIDIA called hopper? Well, that name is now a registered trademark, and guess who registered it? Yep, NVIDIA. 

Next years Nvidia Ampere GPUs have not yet even been announced and now the supposedly next-generation chip generation Hopper info already spreads on the web, Hopper could be based on a multi-die design, you know chiplets.

Hopper (Grace Hopper) is the name of yet another mathematician being applied to architecture. She has been involved in groundbreaking projects, such as the Mark I super-computer (at the time) at Harvard University, and revolutionized computer science with the first high-level programming language COBOL. Now her name is supposed to adorn Nvidia's next-generation GPU: The Hopper architecture is to follow Ampere (presumably RTX 3000) and be manufactured in chiplet (MCM) design.

MCM design scale less for GPUs, think a little about SLI for example and the problems that come with it. However, it also offers significant advantages in production. The larger a chip is, the higher the risk of production error that can render the chip completely unusable (yields). MCM can create far larger packages than the limitations of one chip alone, so they are very scalable. It might be a trend for graphics chips. However, these are for the time being unconfirmed rumors, all of them.

Trademarks

So with that explained once more, this all was based on a rumor, however, NVIDIA registered 'NVIDIA Hopper' as a trademark, and also 'NVIDIA Aerial' which is related to 5G developments. On December 4th the trademarks got registered, and yeah that indicates the rumors to be valid. Hopper will follow next year's Ampere, which indeed could be MCM design but that last part remains speculation.

Rumored NVIDIA Next Gen-GPU codenamed Hopper gets a registered trademark