Gaming enthusiasts won’t have to wait much longer for NVIDIA’s next-generation flagship graphics card, according to a report from a Chinese website known as BenchLife on Friday. BenchLife has a pretty solid track record when it comes to leaks for AMD and NVIDIA products, so it’s safe to assume that the website’s claim that NVIDIA is planning to launch the new GeForce GTX 1080 in May is at least somewhat accurate. The website also claims that the graphics card will come with 8GB GDDR5X memory, but won’t have HBM2 memory.
Before we begin I want to make clear it that I’m only posting this story because BenchLife stories are usually correct (in the past they released many Intel and AMD slides, which turned out to be true). However I’m still not convinced, especially about the name: GTX 1080 (I would rather expect GTX 1800, which corresponds to Quadro naming schema). BenchLife are very specific in their post about few things (which is not very common for rumors). First of all they claim Jen-Hsun will announce Pascal architecture in April. They further report that NVIDIA is planning to launch GeForce GTX 1080 in May, shortly before Computex. Most importantly though the new flagship would not have HBM2 memory. Card is allegedly equipped with 8GB GDDR5X memory, which basically means HBM2 will have to wait for Pascal GP100. Now does it make sense? Technically yes, because mass production of HBM2 modules is not expected to begin sooner than third quarter. FinFET GPU production is probably doing much better than HBM production, so NVIDIA could have taken a safe route that would protect them from any possible issues with HBM production. So rather than wait for new memory chips, NVIDIA is going to use known technology and focus exclusively on new power efficient 16nm FF node.
