NVIDIA Pascal GPU with HBM2 Taped Out – GP100
Rumor has it that NVIDIA has taped out the big GP100 ‘Pascal’ GPU with TSMC on the 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) manufacturing process. A successful tape-out is a good sign that NVIDIA is on track for delivering Pascal based GPUs sometime in 2016 and also supports the rumor that they will be doing a top down release. Now that the rumor mill believes the GP100 GPU has been taped out it will likely soon be in the hands of NVIDIA’s engineering team for some last minute tweaks if needed. Once they ensure everything it okay they will give TSMC the green light to start mass producing wafers full of Pascal GPUs!
NVIDIA already has announced that Pascal will feature mixed precision, 3D Memory (likely HBM2) and NVLink technology. The website 3DCenter has speculated that the NVIDIA GP100 CPU will be roughly 500-550mm in size with between 4500-6000 shader units and up to 32GB of HBM2 memory on a 4096-bit DDR memory interface with HBM2. They note that desktop gaming graphics cards will likely see 16GB of memory on the flagship cards. Those stats are pretty insane and at this point they are likely just wild guesses as to what they think NVIDIA is up to. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X (Maxwell GM200) has 3,072 CUDA cores though, which is up 2,688 CUDA cores on the original NVIDIA GeForce GTX Tian (Kepler GK110) card. NVIDIA could double the number of CUDA cores could easily double up the number of cores that they want on a GPU, but it is something they haven’t done in recent chip designs.
The AMD Radeon Fury X with the Fiji GPU and HMB1 better be a beast as whatever graphics card the NVIDIA GP100 ‘Pascal’ ends up on is looking like it will be a beast with newer HBM2 memory. Then again AMD could just roll out a Fiji refresh with HBM2 memory in the middle of 2016 to stay competitive. Who knows who will have the best performing video card in 2016 as right now neither company has released numbers and all this is based on leaks and speculation! Hopefully by then we’ll have a wider selection of 4K Ultra HD gaming monitors that are capable of over 60Hz refresh rates!
