Donning the leather jacket he goes very few places without, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed up at an AI meet-up at Stanford this evening to show, for the very first time, a graphics card based on a never before seen Pascal GP102 GPU. 

titanxpascal1.jpg

Source: Twitter (NVIDIA)

Rehashing an old name, NVIDIA will call this new graphics card the Titan X. You know, like the "new iPad" this is the "new TitanX." Here is the data we know about thus far:

  Titan X (Pascal) GTX 1080 GTX 980 Ti TITAN X GTX 980 R9 Fury X R9 Fury R9 Nano R9 390X
GPU GP102 GP104 GM200 GM200 GM204 Fiji XT Fiji Pro Fiji XT Hawaii XT
GPU Cores 3584 2560 2816 3072 2048 4096 3584 4096 2816
Rated Clock 1417 MHz 1607 MHz 1000 MHz 1000 MHz 1126 MHz 1050 MHz 1000 MHz up to 1000 MHz 1050 MHz
Texture Units 224 (?) 160 176 192 128 256 224 256 176
ROP Units 96 (?) 64 96 96 64 64 64 64 64
Memory 12GB 8GB 6GB 12GB 4GB 4GB 4GB 4GB 8GB
Memory Clock 10000 MHz 10000 MHz 7000 MHz 7000 MHz 7000 MHz 500 MHz 500 MHz 500 MHz 6000 MHz
Memory Interface 384-bit G5X 256-bit G5X 384-bit 384-bit 256-bit 4096-bit (HBM) 4096-bit (HBM) 4096-bit (HBM) 512-bit
Memory Bandwidth 480 GB/s 320 GB/s 336 GB/s 336 GB/s 224 GB/s 512 GB/s 512 GB/s 512 GB/s 320 GB/s
TDP 250 watts 180 watts 250 watts 250 watts 165 watts 275 watts 275 watts 175 watts 275 watts
Peak Compute 11.0 TFLOPS 8.2 TFLOPS 5.63 TFLOPS 6.14 TFLOPS 4.61 TFLOPS 8.60 TFLOPS 7.20 TFLOPS 8.19 TFLOPS 5.63 TFLOPS
Transistor Count 11.0B 7.2B 8.0B 8.0B 5.2B 8.9B 8.9B 8.9B 6.2B
Process Tech 16nm 16nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm
MSRP (current) $1,200 $599 $649 $999 $499 $649 $549 $499 $329

Note: everything with a ? on is educated guesses on our part.

Obviously there is a lot for us to still learn about this new GPU and graphics card, including why in the WORLD it is still being called Titan X, rather than...just about anything else. That aside, GP102 will feature 40% more CUDA cores than the GP104 at slightly lower clock speeds. The rated 11 TFLOPS of single precision compute of the new Titan X is 34% better than that of the GeForce GTX 1080 and I would expect gaming performance to scale in line with that difference.

The new Titan X will feature 12GB of GDDR5X memory, not HBM as the GP100 chip has, so this is clearly a new chip with a new memory interface. NVIDIA claims it will have 480 GB/s of bandwidth, and I am guessing is built on a 384-bit memory controller interface running at the same 10 Gbps as the GTX 1080. It's truly amazing hardware.

What will you be asked to pay? $1200, going on sale on August 2nd, and only on NVIDIA.com, at least for now. Considering the prices of GeForce GTX 1080 cards with such limited availability, the $1200 price tag MIGHT NOT seem so insane. That's higher than the $999 starting price of the Titan X based on Maxwell in March of 2015 - the claims that NVIDIA is artificially raising prices of cards in each segment will continue, it seems.

I am curious about the TDP on the new Titan X - will it hit the 250 watt mark of the previous version? Yes, apparently it will it that 250 watt TDP - specs above updated. Does this also mean we'll see a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti that falls between the GTX 1080 and this new Titan X? Maybe, but we are likely looking at an $899 or higher SEP - so get those wallets ready. 

That's it for now; we'll have a briefing where we can get more details soon, and hopefully a review ready for you on August 2nd when the cards go on sale!