volta is the codename for a gpu microarchitecture developed by nvidia, succeeding pascal. it was first announced on a roadmap in march 2013. however the first product was not announced until may 2017. the architecture is named after 18th - 19th century italian chemist and physicist alessandro volta. it was nvidia's first chip to feature tensor cores, specially designed cores that have superior deep learning performance over regular cuda cores. the architecture is produced with tsmc's 12 nm finfet process.