NVIDIA Pascal to Enter Mass Shipments in July

Yesterday, we reported on AMD’s plans to supposedly launch their next graphics architecture, codenamed ‘Polaris’ in June. The details surrounding NVIDIA’s response with Pascal aimed at consumers was unknown but it seemed likely the range would arrive at a similar date. According to new information sourced by Digitimes, Pascal will be unveiled during Computex and enter mass shipments in July:

“The graphics card players will begin mass shipping their Pascal graphics cards in July and they expect the new-generation graphics card to increase their shipments and profits in the third quarter.”

Interestingly, the report claims that AMD might only unveil the Polaris range in June, and shipments could occur at a later date. Apparently, NVIDIA will have the advantage and be the first company to release their new line-up to the public:

“Meanwhile, AMD has prepared Polaris-based GPUs to compete against Nvidia’s Pascal; however, the GPUs will be released later than Nvidia’s Pascal and therefore the graphics card players’ third-quarter performance will mainly be driven by demand for their Nvidia products.”

Thankfully, both graphics card manufacturers look set to release brand new products and I cannot wait to see the performance improvements and pricing across various tiers. AMD appears to be focussing on performance per watt on Polaris and the demonstrations thus far have been impressive. Sadly, we haven’t really seen anything from NVIDIA’s new consumer line-up, so it will be fascinating when the samples finally arrive. It’s still unknown which products will opt for HBM2, if any. It’s clear that the majority of models from both companies are set to utilize GDDR5X. While this isn’t a patch on HBM2, it’s a good improvement from the older GDDR5 standard.

Recently, there were some murmurings about NVIDIA delaying mainstream Pascal under 2017. This doesn’t look like the case at all, and if anything, reports suggest they will be the first to market.