Jen-Hsun has revealed NVIDIA GPU architecture roadmap for near future.
The CEO of NVIDIA focused on Pascal architecture, which is expected next year. Pascal will be the first architecture to introduce mixed precision. Pascal will also feature 3D memory, and NVLink.
Pascal architecture:
- Mixed Precision
- 3D Memory
- NVLink
Jen-Hsun gave us (very) rough estimates of the possible performance of new architecture compared to Maxwell. He said:
- Pascal has 2x floating point performance of Maxwell
- Pascal has 2.7x memory capacity of Maxwell
- Pascal has 4x mixed precision of Maxwell
He also told us that Pascal will be 10x faster than Maxwell. What he meant is that bandwidth and computing improvements will roughly provide 5x the performance of Maxwell. Plus, thanks to new multi-gpu interconnection called NVLink it will also double this performance, giving us 10x of what Maxwell can offer. It is really hard to verify this equation, as everything is just a mathetmatical theory right now.
The next few years will bring a massive change to GPU industry. We are looking at stacked memory, smaller fabrication node, NVLink, DirectX12 and popularization of Adaptive V-Sync. What are you guys waiting for the most?
Pascal memory bandwidth is estimated at 750 GB/s. This roughly translated into 1500 MHz clock and 4 stacked HBM modules 1024-bit each.
Pascal will introduce much higher memory capacities. We are looking at 32GBs for most high-end models. Volta will double this value to 64 GB.
