It's been a long time coming, but the day is finally here! The two major desktop dedicated GPU manufacturers both are close slash ready for the newest GPUs. 'It's been a time long coming' was written in that first line, and not without reason. The graphics card industry, or the GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today's GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi.

Just over a month ago, we had already seen a new massive scale and scalar GPU from Nvidia, Big Pascal is actually already used in the Tesla P100 computing unit, and we have learned much from that release last month. Though not related to today's release; that GPU has 3,840 shader processors, again 3,840 shader cores with 240 texture units. That one GPU can boast roughly 11 TFLOPS of single precision performance, which is massive by any standard. Next to that "Big Pascal" is a HBM2 based product. Now, as you can understand "Big Pascal" is not ready for mass production on the consumer market, but Nvidia has the next best thing ready and lined up for you which will be available in high volume, and likely will be in high demand. For weeks now we?ve been seeing the rumors, would Nvidia name the Pascal based GeForce GTX series the GeForce GTX 1070/1080 and will there be a 1080 Ti model? The GPU naming surfaced as well. Logic, however, would assume a Ti release later in the year opposed to everything being released at once in the summer.