NVIDIA Pascal GPU to feature 17B transistors and 32GB HBM2

12:56 Hardware 1 Comments

In an exclusive report published by Fudzilla, the site reveals that NVIDIA’s next generation Pascal GPU will feature 17 billion transistors crammed inside its core. Currently, the flagship GM200 core found on the GeForce GTX Titan X comes with 8.0 Billion transistors while the competitor, the Radeon R9 Fury X has a total of 8.9 Billion transistors inside its Fiji GPU. The 17 Billion transistors on the Pascal GPU are twice the transistors found on the GM200 Maxwell and the Fiji XT GPU core which is literally insane. Pascal is meant to be NVIDIA’s next high performance, compute focused graphics architecture which will be found on all market segments that will include GeForce, Quadro and even Tesla. Based on TSMC’s 16nm process node, NVIDIA’s Pascal GPU will not only feature the best performance in graphics but also the most power efficient architecture ever made by a GPU manufacturer.

It was revealed a few days ago that NVIDIA’s Pascal GP100 chip has already been taped out on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process, last month. This means that we can see a launch of these chips as early as Q2 2016. Given that the transistor count is correct, we can expect a incremental performance increase from Pascal across the range of graphics cards that will be introduced.

With HBM2, NVIDIA gets access to more denser chips that will result in cards with 16 GB and up to 32 GB of HBM memory across a massive 4096bit memory interface which will dominate the next high-resolution 4K and 8K gaming panels.Although they may have to wait a little bit longer thanks to AMD’s priority access to HBM2 with SK Hynix, the makers of HBM. With 8Gb per DRAM die and 2 Gbps speed per pin, we get approximately 256 GB/s bandwidth per HBM2 stack. With four stacks in total, we will get 1 TB/s bandwidth on NVIDIA’s GP100 flagship Pascal which is twice compared to the 512 GB/s on AMD’s Fiji cards and three times that of the 980 Ti’s 334GB/s.

This is going to be a massive leap if it does ship early/mid next year. Does AMD have anything in the pipeline to counter something like this?