Hardware reviewers are still drooling over the ridiculous power of NVIDIA’s new Titan X graphics card but the company is already teasing its next-generation GPU technology, known as Pascal, which will far exceed even the Titan X in terms of performance. At least as far as compute tasks are concerned, Pascal-based GPUs will have roughly ten times the performance of the Maxwell-based GPUs we have now, could run up to 32GB of RAM, and even support 8-way SLI.
If Nvidia’s beastly new Titan X graphics card wows you—and it should—well, hold onto your pants: The company said it’s next-gen GPU technology, codenamed Pascal, will offer roughly ten times the performance of the Titan X, at least in compute tasks. The next-generation GPU from Nvidia would also offer a host of new technologies, including 3D-stacked memory and NVLink, said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the GPU Technology Conference’s keynote in San Jose. The GPU will essentially be a super computer, Huang said, and Nvidia is shooting for it to be ten times faster than today’s Maxwell-based GPUs. Huang also revealed that a Pascal GPU could run up to 32GB of RAM, rather than the maximum of 12GB a Maxwell-based card can use. All-important memory bandwidth—which can choke a GPU’s performance if it can’t keep up—will be three times that of Maxwell. Since Pascal will feature the company’s upcoming NVLink technology, which Nvidia claims outperforms PCI-E by five times, Huang says he expects to be able to run up to eight discrete GPUs in a single machine, rather than today’s limit of four.
