Nvidia is the next big company becoming the next Coronavirus event casualty. The company has canceled its GPU Technology Conference due to concerns of the COVID-19 coronavirus. The event was scheduled to take place on March 23 with extra precautions and enhanced sanitization procedures, but has now become an online-only show.
Nvidia's boss, Jensen Huang, stated that Nvidia will still be holding the event without the physical component involved. The company made a brief and straightforward announcement stating the health concerns of its employees and attendees come first. Instead of the physical event, the keynote event will be now delivered via livestream and the company is currently "working with our conference speakers to begin publishing their talks online beginning in the weeks ahead".
Speaking of Nvidia, we know that the company has experience in delivering excellent online presentations. So, we can also expect a similar quality of presentation, if not better, for the GTC presentation.
So, what's coming during the keynote presentation? We are expecting Nvidia to announce its next-generation GPU architecture, which could have made this year's GTC the most important one of the last few years. The current Volta architecture-based GV100 Nvidia GPUs have become quite old now and the company is expected to move toward the more powerful Tesla accelerator. Speaking of Tesla, the current Tesla-based GPUs have been a great success for Nvidia. We expect that the GPU giant will use that momentum to deliver much powerful GPU computing power.
The full announcement from Nvidia reads as follows:
"NVIDIA has decided to shift GTC 2020 on March 22-26 to an online event due to growing concern over the coronavirus. This decision to move the event online instead of at the San Jose Convention Center reflects our top priority: the health and safety of our employees, our partners and our customers. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will still deliver a keynote address, which will be available exclusively by livestream. We’re working to schedule that and will share details once they’re available. We will be working with our conference speakers to begin publishing their talks online beginning in the weeks ahead. Please visit https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc/ for updates. Additionally, for those in NVIDIA’s developer program, we plan to schedule availability with our researchers, engineers and solution architects to answer technical questions. Those who have registered for a GTC pass will receive a full refund. Stay tuned for details. We’re grateful to the great many individuals and partners who have worked to support this event and thank them for their understanding during these unusual times."
