Nvidia Pascal Launch May Be Sooner Than We Thought

Last month we received word that the first Pascal chips would be launching a bit sooner than expected. At that time, GP100 was expected to drop in April and GP104 in June. According to the latest rumors, it looks like that timetable was accurate, with the GP100 based Tesla chip coming in April around GTC. What’s more, we’re getting more details about when the rest of Nvidia’s Pascal lineup will launch.

As with the previous report, GP104 will arrive in June and it looks like the GTX lineup will be based off that, with both the GTX 1080 and 1070 being GP104 chips. Near the end of the year in Q4, we can expect GP106 and GP107. These will be longer end chips and likely power the GTX 1060 and 1050. Finally, we have the Titan which will use GP100 and a GP108 in early 2017. This follow’s Nvidia’s new trend of releasing a GTX x80 first, followed by the Titan, then finally a GTX x80Ti. While it’s good for Nvidia’s sales, it moves high-end users into a quicker upgrade schedule than if all the cards launched at the same time.

The Tesla launching first makes a whole lot of sense as enterprise users can pay the high premiums for early HBM2 and 16nm. A June launch for GP104 may point to them using HBM2 as the timeline is a bit tight for GDDR5X though it is doable. The biggest question is how well Pascal will perform as it is a stopgap architecture between Maxwell and Volta, like a Maxwellv2 though the die shrink to 16nm should make some great gains in and of itself.