Rumours about Nvidia’s plans to release a Pascal GPU refresh sometime next year are circulating. This, however, isn’t something that can be considered as surprising; the company has done this before with Kepler and Maxwell GPUs. Interestingly, it seems that with Pascal 2.0, more products will be equipped with the GP102 GPU, which is currently only found on the updated Titan X graphics card.
With the update to the Pascal architecture, consumers can expect to see Nvidia releasing more ‘affordable’ high-end graphics cards by next year. In addition, updates to the Pascal GPUs could also see Nvidia opting for the 14nm FinFet process technology made by Samsung. Pascal GPUs are currently based on the 16nm FinFet process by TSMC.
In addition to the GPU architecture update, Nvidia may also be planning to equip most of its upcoming graphics cards with the GDDR5X memory controller. According to sources, Micron’s GGDR5X production yields are starting to improve, which means Nvidia will be able to use the memory controller on more graphics cards next year. The only exception to this would be the low-end Pascal GP107-based graphics cards, which will remain with the GDDR5 memory standard.
Unfortunately, we’ll probably have to wait until next year or until there’s an official announcement by Nvidia about Pascal 2.0 to be sure of these changes.
