The American tech company NVIDIA is bound to launch a new graphic architecture codenamed Pascal. The upcoming graphic card is expected to feature 17 billion transistors in its core for crisper graphics and clearer details.
According to Ecumenical News, the NVIDIA Pascal was unveiled last March during the GTC event in San Jose but more details about the Pascal were revealed during the GPU Technology Conference in Japan.
The company is planning to enhance the already impressive power productivity that its Maxwell-based cards offer with the Pascal. With the said GPU, devices can double the output per Watt that the Maxwell architecture now gives, courtesy of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) 16nm FinFET process. This is an important process as it transitions from 2D to 3D transistors, thus increasing the power saved.
It was also reported that NVIDIA will be cramming 17 billion transistors in the Pascal GPU's core, which is twice what's found on the GM200 Maxwell and the Fiji XT GPU. The new graphics chip has been established by NVIDIA to be the premiere compute focused graphics architecture that will be used by even GeForce, Quadro and Tesla.
Furthermore, VR World stated that Pascal will be accessible in multi-GPU packaging. This would replace the Tesla K80 (NVIDIA skipped Maxwell-gen dual-GPU Tesla). The combined figures are very interesting to compare - 24GB GDDR5 and 480GB/s bandwidth should be replaced with 32GB HBM2 and 2TB/s bandwidth, mutually connected through NVLink rather than PCIe. The NVLink will allow up to 80GB/s, which should replace PLX PCIe Gen3 bridge chips that can only support 16GB/s (8GB/s per GPU). This part should be 'warm up' for 2018 and the Volta architecture.
Vine Report added that compared to AMD's Fury, the new NVIDIA Pascal GPU assures at least twice the increase in bandwidth. Meanwhile, as the Fury line has received a somewhat lukewarm response from the market, the company is also working hard on its own line called Zen which is expected to compete against NVIDIA's Pascal.
Meanwhile, the company has released no official confirmation yet, but the upcoming Pascal GPU is expected to arrive sometime in the first half of 2016. Its rival GPU from AMD may also be released at the same time.
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