Nvidia Pascal Flagship May Arrive Sooner Than Expected

Even as this generation’s GPUs are continuing to fly off the shelves, Nvidia is already gearing up for their Pascal launch. Despite being quieter than AMD, it looks like Nvidia will launch their Pascal cards around the same time, in 2H 2016 as AMD’s Polaris will. What’s more, 2H 2016 will see Nvidia’s flagship Pascal GPU based on TSMC’s 16nmFF+ process and utilizing HBM2. This is still a rumour right now but it does fit the time frame since 1H 2016 would be too soon and 2017 too late.

The biggest question is what does”flagship” mean exactly. Ever since GTX 680 was launched, Nvidia has been playing around with the word flagship. Traditionally, the big dies like GF110 would launch first with the smaller mainstream GF104 launching after. Kepler and Maxwell saw that switch with GK104 and GM104 launching ahead of GK110 and GM200 respectively. This suggests that the so-called “flagship” may only be GP104 and not GP100. Even if it is GP100, it may well be a cut-down version, similar to how the GTX 780 was the cut-down variant of the later GTX 780Ti. This strategy does maximize sales for Nvidia but isn’t that great for consumers.

Whatever the card is, be it GP104 or GP100, it is going to use HBM2, giving it at least 512GB/s with 8GB of VRAM but potentially much higher at 16-32GB with 1TB/s+ of bandwidth. With AMD set to launch Polaris around the same time, Q3 2016 should make for exciting times as a slew of new GPUs arrive.