Nvidia has officially and publicly updated its GPU roadmap to show what to expect after we are done with the Maxwell GPU family, the Volta GPU family. Named after one of the great Italian physicists, Alessandro Volta, known among other things for the invention of the battery, the Volta GPU family will bring an impressive new feature - stacked DRAM.

Since we are still far away from the launch of Volta GPU family Nvidia did not reveal that many details but it has detailed one of the key features of the Volta GPU family, the stacked DRAM concep. The reason, or simply put the advantage behind  stacked DRAM is to place the DRAM close (on the same package) to the GPU and connect it, according to Nvidia, by cutting a hole through the silicon layer placed between the GPU and stacked DRAM. By doing this, Nvidia should be able to improve both bandwidth and latency by getting rid of the standard/external memory bus.

According to what Jen-Hsun Huang revealed at GTC 2013, Nvidia aims to achieve a 1TB/sec of bandwidth on Volta which ends up around three times what we are now seeing on the GTX Titan. Jen-Hsun Huang noted that with this kind of bandwidth it is possible to move the equivalent of a full Blu-Ray disc worth of data in just 1/50th of a second.

It all sounds quite impressive but since Maxwell is expected in 2014, we will not see the Volta GPU family before the 2016, at least if all goes well and Nvidia follows its standard two year GPU schedule. Bear in mind that Nvidia did want Kepler to be the 2011 rather than the 2012 product and Maxwell slipped from 2013 to 2014, so we certainly hope that Volta will not share the same fate.