Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 gets GDDR5X – GTX 1070 stops at GDDR5

A new generation of graphics cards is approaching and by all accounts, Nvidia will be the first to come out with the architecture Pascal. The company has already announced the monster circuit GP100, which first lands in the calculation card Tesla P100. By all accounts, it takes a while before it finds out to consumers, where GP104 is instead expected to be first out.

When images on the graphics circuit GP104 found out, it was in the company of GDDR5 memory, contrary to previous information that talked about GDDR5X. Bits and Chips now reports that both technologies may be relevant and constitute the main segmentation within the company’s performance segment.

According to the data, the full-scale variant of GP104 (GP104-400) will be equipped with GDDR5X, while a scaled-down (GP104-200) with fewer CUDA cores will step down to GDDR5. This would mean that the two will not be able to use the same circuit board, without these having to be tailored to the respective configuration. Both versions are believed to be Geforce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.

The fact that the two configurations could not use the same circuit board is due to the fact that the memory capsules differ physically, even though the technologies are closely related. The GDDR5X memory type is housed in 14 x 10 mm BGA capsules and has 190 contact pins, while GDDR5 measures 14 x 12 mm and has 170 pins.

By all accounts, the GP104 comes with a 256-bit memory bus, which means that the variant with GDDR5 gets a memory bandwidth of 224 or 256 GB / s at a clock frequency of 7 and 8 GHz respectively. With GDDR5X ticking at 10–12 GHz, this goes up to 320–384 GB / s.

The launches of the Geforce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 take place around Computex 2016, which takes place between 31 May and 4 June.