GTX 1070 is 75% of GP104 Die

Last week, after the GTX 1080 launch, our focus was on the GTX 1070. Being the cut-down GP104 card, the GTX 1070 was expected to offer very close performance at a significantly lower price. At that time, we came up with what we expected would be the specifications based on the difference in TFLOPs between the cards. Unfortunately, it seems like the GTX 1070 won’t be as close to the GTX 1080 as we had hoped.

According to the source, the GTX 1070 will feature 1920 CUDA cores with a max boost frequency of 1600mhz. This is significantly lower than the 2304 or 2048 CUDA cores we predicted though the clock speed is about right. The TMU count gets cut to 120 while the 64 ROPs from the full GP104 are retained. 8GB of VRAM remains standard though it is only GDDR5 and over a 256bit bus. This gives us a total of 6.5 TFLOPs of performance with 150W TDP.

By cutting the GTX 1070 so much, Nvidia has really differentiated the top tier GP104 from the cut die. With 25% of the die cut out, you can take the GP104 die shot and wipe out a quarter of it. This level of trimming is also unprecedented for a Gx04 level card, with past 2nd tier Gx04 dies generally only having 20% or less cut. In fact, only the GTX 970 was cut by 20%, with the 670 and 560 fairing much better. However, as long as the GTX 1070 holds up against the GTX 980Ti at a lower price, being cut down so much won’t really matter.

With such a big gap, it does open up an opportunity for AMD to slot in cards to bracket the GTX 1070. Given what we know of Polaris 10, this may be a possibility. Either way, I am looking forward to the more wallet-friendly cards from AMD and Nvidia this time around.