Nvidia Pascal GP104 Spotted?
Samuel Wan / 9 years ago
So far all of the rumours around the GP104 and GTX 1000 series have mostly been about release date and specifications. The closest we’ve gotten to physical evidence have been the shrouds for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. For the first time, we’re getting a picture of the physical die and parts of the GPU board around it. According to ChipHell, the die shot you see below belongs to the GP104, the mainstream Pascal GPU.
From the die shot picture, GP104 appears to be about 15.35mm x 19.18mm for a total of about 290 to 300mm². This is the same as GK104 which was also a die shrink and came in at 294mm² and much smaller than GM204 which was a relatively massive 398mm². This shows that Nvidia is starting out with small dies first with the GTX 1070 and 1080 and releasing a GP100/102 Titan and 980Ti later on.
For now, we still don’t know what GP104 will look like, but it seems that most of the FP64 units in GP100 will likely be stripped out and replaced by the more ‘useful’ FP32 ones. The leak also suggests that total FP32 CUDA core count will be around the same as the Titan X but the TMU and ROP count seems closer to the GTX 980. I expect that clock for clock, GP104 won’t be much faster than the Titan X but it will be ahead and much more efficient.
Finally, we can see what appears to be Samsung 2Ghz 1GB GDDR5 DRAM modules for 8GB total. This suggests that that GDDR5X isn’t ready in time or will be reserved for the GP100/102 consumer release. This follows the same trend set by the GTX 680 which was more powerful than the 580 but featured lower memory bus width but faster VRAM and more memory overall.
While the leak is promising, it is a leak after all and I would make sure to take all of this with a shipload of salt. Given the information we know though, this leak may very well reflect reality.