LIFE AFTER PASCAL
Building on a winning formula
Nvidia had a phenomenal 2016, thanks mainly to it being able to sort out its 16nm production process, and put it to good use with its Pascal architecture. Star of the show was, and still is, the GTX 1080, although for those with a more reserved eye on their bank balances, the likes of the GTX 1070 and 1060 have possibly had more sway in actual upgrades. Meanwhile, at the top end, the new take on the Titan X won plenty of plaudits, if you could afford premium pixel pumpers, and could actually find a reseller with stock.
Fast-forward to 2017, and we should see the last logical addition to the family, the GTX 1080 Ti, make an appearance. It’s rumored to sit between the Titan X and the GTX 1080, with a specification and price to match. The reason that it hasn’t been released sooner than this? There hasn’t been a need for it—AMD doesn’t have a competing card at the high end to take on the GTX 1080, which means Nvidia has been able to employ a wait and see approach to proceedings. We will probably see the 1080 Ti as a response to an R9 490X. Expect 10GB of GDDR5X on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, 60 streaming multiprocessors, and a sub-$1,000 price tag.
The next major GPU architecture from Nvidia goes by the codename Volta, and we could see the first GPU based on Volta as soon as May—it’s expected to appear at the Graphics Technology Conference. Volta was originally planned for release in 2018 using the 10nm FinFET production process, but given the pains Nvidia and TSMC have had shifting to 16nm, it’s no surprise that the transition has been delayed. So, Volta will use the same 16nm process as Pascal, but benefit from a few tweaks in a move that is reminiscent of Intel’s Tick-Tock updating regime.
Details are scarce, but we know Volta will support stacked RAM, aka HBM 2.0 (see “The Memory Conundrum” opposite). The expectation is that Volta will do much better when it comes to asynchronous compute, too, as used by DirectX 12 and Vulkan. Despite the fact that Pascal has been warmly welcomed commercially and critically, AMD still has the edge when it comes to some DX12 code paths.