While we have been hearing about the impending unveiling and demonstration of GPUs based on nVidia’s latest Pascal architecture for a while, there hasn’t been much substance behind all the rumors until now.
In what appears to be a leaked shipping log for nVidia GPUs, a bunch of details stood out and caught our eye.
There are two distinct GPUs listed, one priced at $600 and the other at a whopping $900, clearly hinting that they are high-performance cards. Now the serial number is where it gets interesting: nVidia’s code for its opening keynote (ignoring the prefixes) is also 699.
Normally, I would treat it as a coincidence. The 699 serial number, though, is synonymous with Pascal boards. That it was first spotted in December points to the same conclusion as well.
If indeed nVidia is planning to demo Pascal-based boards at the GPU Tech Conference, scheduled to be held in April, it’s going to headline the whole event.
We would like to remind our readers at this point that the Pascal architecture is a major upgrade over its predecessor, Maxwell, on paper. Pascal has a brand new approach towards GPU memory as well as being a 16nm architecture, compared to Maxwell’s 28nm. There is NVLink to spice up the GPGPU side of things as well although it’ll only be available once IBM releases its PowerPC processors in 2017.
When it comes to memory, gone are the days of GDDR5. High-Bandwidth-Memory is starting to cement its place as the industry standard now. Add GPU and system memory unification to that and you’ve got a headline-grabber.
It’s not difficult to see why Pascal is generating so much press interest. The question is:will it be able to live up to the hype? Will it be able to surpass the success of Maxwell? We can only wait and see!