Turing (microarchitecture)

Turing

Launched	September 20, 2018; 6 years ago (2018-09-20)
Designed by	Nvidia
Manufactured by	TSMC
Fabrication process	TSMC 12FFC
Codename(s)	TU10x TU11x
Product Series
Desktop	GeForce GTX 16 series GeForce RTX 20 series
Professional/workstation	Quadro RTX
Server/datacenter	Tesla T4
Specifications
Compute	28.5 TFLOPS (FP16) 14.2 TFLOPS (FP32) [1]
L1 cache	96 KB (per SM)
L2 cache	2 MB to 6 MB
Memory support	GDDR6 HBM2
PCIe support	PCIe 3.0
Supported Graphics APIs
DirectX	DirectX 12 Ultimate (Feature Level 12_2)
Direct3D	Direct3D 12.0
Shader Model	Shader Model 6.7
OpenCL	OpenCL 3.0
OpenGL	OpenGL 4.6
CUDA	Compute Capability 7.5
Vulkan	Vulkan 1.3
Media Engine
Encode codecs	H.264 H.265
Decode codecs	H.264 H.265
Color bit-depth	8-bit 10-bit
Encoder(s) supported	NVENC
Display outputs	DisplayPort 1.4a HDMI 2.0b USB-C
History
Predecessor	Pascal
Variant	Volta (datacenter/HPC)
Successor	Ampere

Turing is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia. It is named after the prominent mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The architecture was first introduced in August 2018 at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the workstation-oriented Quadro RTX cards,^[2] and one week later at Gamescom in consumer GeForce 20 series graphics cards.^[3] Building on the preliminary work of Volta, its HPC-exclusive predecessor, the Turing architecture introduces the first consumer products capable of real-time ray tracing, a longstanding goal of the computer graphics industry. Key elements include dedicated artificial intelligence processors ("Tensor cores") and dedicated ray tracing processors ("RT cores"). Turing leverages DXR, OptiX, and Vulkan for access to ray tracing. In February 2019, Nvidia released the GeForce 16 series GPUs, which utilizes the new Turing design but lacks the RT and Tensor cores.

Turing is manufactured using TSMC's 12 nm FinFET semiconductor fabrication process. The high-end TU102 GPU includes 18.6 billion transistors fabricated using this process.^[1] Turing also uses GDDR6 memory from Samsung Electronics, and previously Micron Technology.