The tech world is abuzz with rumours regarding NVIDIA’s next-generation architecture, Pascal, and the latest word (in German) is that the GPU producer will be introducing a successor to GDDR5 with it. Speculation says that NVIDIA will debut GDDR5X with its next-gen GeForce cards. While it will likely retain the familiar 256-bit memory interface, the GDDR5X’s bandwidth will stretch to 448GB/sec, blowing all its AMD rivals – bar the Fiji-based HBM cards, which are thought to be under threat due to reported supply problems – out of the water. HBM2 should also feature in its new graphics cards, with a 2048-bit memory bus at 1GHz and a 512GB/sec memory bandwidth.
NVIDIA is thought to have been testing its Pascal architecture since last month, but the latest rumours suggest that the tests involve the GP100 and GP104 chips. To clarify, for those unfamiliar with NVIDIA’s GPU naming convention, its GM204 chip powers the GTX 980 and the GTX 970, with the GM100 integral to the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti. Therefore, the GP100 and GP104 will mark the high-end Titan cards and the consumer GeForce cards, respectively.
NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture with GDDR5X is expected to hit the market towards the end of 2016.
Image courtesy of Enterprise Tech.
There where new photos of how Pascal will look like just 15-20 days ago, from a conference I think, of Nvidia, so these rumors are probably stupid. The only other explanation is two models of Pascal with, of course different memory controller. Nvidia does have the money to create half a dozen models. Quadro/Titan/Tesla/whatever going HBM 2 and the GeForce models using GDDR5X. That will also fix whatever availability problems with HBM2 can come up in the time of Pascal announcement.