NVIDIA’s upcoming architecture, codenamed ‘Pascal’ is a revolutionary step towards greatly enhanced processing power in a small form factor. The advent of stackable high bandwidth memory was first introduced in AMD’s Fury line-up. While AMD was first to market with this technology, they could only utilize HBM1 which has a 4GB VRAM limitation via single GPUs and 8GB with a dual card solution. Thankfully, the second iteration allows for increased memory capacities which is vital given the VRAM utilization of many modern engines.
During NVIDIA’s GTC event in Japan, the company confirmed their flagship Pascal GPU will launch with 16GB HBM2 and feature 1TB/s total bandwidth. This quashes some early theories about NVIDIA’s professional line containing 32GB of HBM2. Obviously, these figures can increase in the future but it greatly depends on the manufacturing costs and supplies of HBM2. It’s important to remember the shortages of AMD’s Fury X line on launch, which was a result of low HBM1 yields.
Nevertheless, Pascal looks set to be an absolute powerhouse, and I cannot wait to see the performance numbers. Furthermore, NVIDIA’s pricing for the flagship model could easily exceed $1000, and perhaps reach $1500 given the pricing of the Titan X, and HBM2 costs.
