While a lot of excitement is going around for the new GTX 1080 and 1070 cards, it seems like NVIDIA aren’t done with their onslaught on the top end of the graphics card market. Currently, there are two main chips based on the Pascal architecture, the GP100 which features their Tesla P100 supercomputing processor and the more well-known GP104 which powers their new top-of-the-line graphics cards. Enter the 1080 Ti, which looks to be aiming for a compromise between the two by making use of GP102 silicon to power which may make for the most powerful consumer graphics card to date.
As a high-performance computing chip, the GP100 is expensive and far beyond what is worth making use of on a consumer card, containing both FP32 (single-precision) and FP64 (double-precision) CUDA cores, capable of running at as much as 3,840 SPFP and 1,920 DPFP for an enormous 5760 total CUDA core count. This is impressive on paper, but unfortunately, the FP64 CUDA cores alone are all but useless on a graphics card right now. GP100 even makes use of a 4096-bit HBM2 memory interface and NVIDIA may not want to tie their next flagship GPU to the limited availability of the top-end HBM2 memory.
With the GP100 commanding a price beyond what would be reasonable for an entry in their GeForce lineup, this is where the GP102 comes in. This chip retains the 3,840 FP32 CUDA cores from the GP100, with the FP64 cores removed. This still leaves the GP102 with a sizeable amount of CUDA cores, approximately 33% more than the GP104. It is yet unknown what memory interface the GP102 will feature, with the leading possibilities being the same GDDR5X or instead opting to bring HBM to the consumer market, just as AMD did with the Fury X.
This looks to be setting the GTX 1080 Ti up to be a worthy success to the lauded 980 Ti, which has commanded a lot of respect for bringing performance similar to the Titan X on a much saner budget. Whether the 1080 Ti will make use of the full specs of GP102 is yet to be seen, but there is a lot for enthusiasts to get excited about.
