Nvidia Pascal 10X Faster Than Maxwell – Due in 2016 on 16nm Featuring 3D Memory, NV-Link and Mixed Precision
Hardware 4 hours ago by
Khalid Moammer
Pascal will feature 4X the mixed precision performance, 2X the performance per watt, 2.7X memory capacity & 3X the bandwidth of Maxwell.
Those are a lot of numbers to digest indeed so lets break them down. Nvidia states that pascal will be the company’s first high performance GPU to feature mixed precision floating point compute FP16. Which is essential for low power devices such as tablets and mobile phones. Mixed precision is also very beneficial from a power efficiency stand point for many compute applications which don’t strictly require higher precision FP32 or FP64 compute which would benefit greatly from this addition.
Nvidia : Pascal is 10X Faster Than Maxwell – Features Mixed Precision, 3D Memory and NV-Link Coming in 2016
Nvidia’s CEO went on to state that pascal will be 10 times faster than Maxwell and he arrived at this conclusion via what he calls “CEO math”. Obviously this was just a humorous way to impress the crowd at GTC 2015 and is based on “very rough estimates”.
Pascal will feature three distinct new technologies.
#1 HBM : Stacked memory will debut on the green side with Pascal. HBM Gen2 more precisely, the second generation of the SK Hynix AMD co-developed high bandwidth JEDEC memory standard. The new memory will enable memory bandwidth to exceed 1 Terabyte/s which is 3X the bandwidth of the Titan X. The new memory standard will also allow for a huge increase in memory capacities, 2.7X the memory capacity of Maxwell to be precise. Which indicates that the new Pascal flagship will feature 32GB of video memory, a mind-bogglingly huge number.
We’ve already seen AMD
take advantage of this memory technology with its R9 390X GPU. Which will feature up to 8GB of HBM delivering 640GB/S of memory bandwidth. Nearly three times that of the GTX 980 and twice that of the GTX Titan X. AMD has also stated that it plans to use the second generation of this new memory technology in future graphics cards. So we’re likely to see both red and green rocking second generation stacked HBM next year.
HBM achieves this amazing improvement in memory bandwidth and capacity by employing a very wide through-silicon-via memory interface. Each HBM cube is connected to the GPU with a 1024bit wide memory bus. HBM modules actually operate at low frequencies compared to GDDR5 but thanks to the significantly wider memory interface they manage to be up to 9 times faster than standard GDDR5 memory modules.
We’ve already covered this
revolutionary new memory technology exclusively and in-depth last year. HBM will quickly replace GDDR5 as the standard memory technology for high performance graphics solutions. It’s fair to say that HBM is the future.
#2 NV-Link : Pascal will also be the first Nvidia GPU to feature the company’s new NV-Link technology which Nvidia states is 5 to 12 times faster than PCIE 3.0.
NVIDIA® NVLink™ is a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that enables ultra-fast communication between the CPU and GPU, and between GPUs. The technology allows data sharing at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe Gen3 interconnect, resulting in dramatic speed-ups in application performance and creating a new breed of high-density, flexible servers for accelerated computing.
#3 16nm manufacturing process : Pascal will the first Nvidia GPU to be built on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET manufacturing process. The new process promises to be significantly more power efficient and significantly more dense than 28nm. Which would enable Nvidia to build significantly more complex and powerful GPUs all the while significantly improving power efficiency.
TSMC’s 16FF+ (FinFET Plus) technology can provide above 65 percent higher speed, around 2 times the density, or 70 percent less power than its 28HPM technology. Comparing with 20SoC technology, 16FF+ provides extra 40% higher speed and 60% power saving. By leveraging the experience of 20SoC technology, TSMC 16FF+ shares the same metal backend process in order to quickly improve yield and demonstrate process maturity for time-to-market value.
Pascal is still scheduled for a 2016 release with Volta coming along sometime after that.
Read more:
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-features-mixed-precision-3d-memory-nvlink/#ixzz3UgH5QsnG