New information emerged regarding Nvidia's Pascal GPU, covering the total compute performance of the much-anticipated FinFET-based chip.
Nvidia talked about the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 module at CES 2016, and it quickly got everyone's attention.
The Drive PX 2 is simply a car supercomputer that relies on the power of graphics processors in order to help engineers make autonomous cars.
Today's information is available courtesy of a member from 3Dcenter, who compiled a number of slides and details that were undisclosed so far, pointing out the highlights of the upcoming Pascal graphics processor.
So far, we know the following aspects about Nvidia's upcoming flagship Pascal GP100 graphics processing unit:
- Pascal graphics architecture
- When we compare it to Maxwell, Pascal rolls two-fold performance per watt
- Successor to the GM200 GPU found in the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti
- Features about 17 billion transistors, two times more than the GM200
- Uses 16nm FinFET base from TSMC
- 4 Mb bus interface, comparable to the Fiji GPU power from the AMD Fury models
- Has half-precision FP16 compute at double the rate of full-precision FP32
- Will sport four 4-Hi HBM2 stacks, giving it 16 GB of VRAM, as well as 8-Hi stacks mounting to 32 GB for professional computations in SKUs
- It will sport exclusive compatibility with next-gen IBM PowerPC server processors due to NVLink
- DirectX 12 feature will be at 12_1 or higher levels
- Launch is scheduled for the second half of 2016
Based on a number of slides from an independent researcher, the Nvidia Pascal GPU100 features Stacked DRAM (1 TB/s) giving it as much as 12 TFLOPs of Single-Precision (FP32) compute performance. The flagship GPU is purportedly able to provide four TFLOPs of Double-Precision (FP64) compute performance as well.
Recent reports show that no less than four different Pascal graphics cards are being tested. Each of the four GPUs will sport relatively similar values, but the GP100 GPU will be the main star of the bunch, thanks to its unprecedented performance.
Speculations roam that we might see the official release of the Tesla GPU during Q2 of 2016.
The flagship GP100 GPU is the direct descendant of the GM200 GPU, a graphics processing unit mostly famous for its performances in the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti.
Nvidia is expected to give more details on its next-gen GPUs at the company's GPU Technology Conference that is slated to occur in early April.
Until then, you can take a more in-depth look at the slides, courtesy of WCCFTech.
