Nvidia announces Pascal, a “processor that’s essentially a supercomputer”

Nvidia on Tuesday announced a new mobile and graphics processor road map, ripping up chip plans it announced one year ago. Nvidia added a new graphics processor called Pascal, which is a “processor that’s essentially a supercomputer,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a keynote on Tuesday at the company’s GPU Technology Conference, which was webcast from San Jose, California.

What comes after Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell? Pascal, according to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. That’s the name of the company’s next-generation GPU, and Huang says it’ll be smaller, faster and more efficient, naturally. “As we compute more, we have to move more data around,” he said, speaking at NVIDIA’s GPU technology conference in San Jose today. “It’s the data bottleneck.” He’s talking about how the speed at which data is exchanged between the CPU and GPU limits the processor’s ability to perform. He’s also talking about how NVIDIA hopes to solve the issue, introducing NVLink, a chip-to-chip communication technology (a new socket) that promises to outpace PCIe communication speeds by a factor of five (but up to 12).