Nvidia Has Reportedly Taped-Out First Pascal GP100 GPU

There’s a lot of hubbub right now about the capabilities of Nvidia’s Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX 980 Ti, as well as the potential performance of AMD’s upcoming Radeon Fury series, but Nvidia already has other things on its mind, it seems. The graphics hardware manufacturer has reportedly taped out the next-generation Pascal GPU with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).

Tape-out is the moment when the final stages of the design are completed for the integrated circuit, and it’s ready for TSMC for creating the first internal samples.The first of these chips manufactured on the Pascal architecture is the GP100, and Nvidia has prototyped the first variant on the FinFET node already.

This Pascal GPU, going by the codename ‘Big Pascal’, is the first in the Pascal family and it’s going to be designed for next-generation high-performance computing and consumer graphics cards.

Of most interest to gamers is that it’s going to be Nvidia’s first GPU to feature High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), rather than the current industry standard - GDDR5. AMD’s upcoming Fiji GPU will be sporting HBM1, but Nvidia is skipping straight to HBM2, which is both faster and allows for 8Hi stacks of memory. Where HBM1 is limited to 4GB HBM per GPU, HBM2 theoretically allows for up to 32GB, with a maximum memory bandwidth of 1.2TB/s.

Taking to the stage earlier this year, during Nvidia’s GTX presentation, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claimed the Pascal GPU will offer 10x the performance of Maxwell, a staggering achievement if in any way true.

If the Pascal GPU has indeed been taped-out then Nvidia is well on course for its launch next year. It’s expected the professional and extreme high-end Pascal graphics cards will be arriving first, before enthusiast cards follow up in Q2/Q3 2016.

Are you holding offer from a 900-series buy in case we see the generation leap Nvidia is claiming? What sort of impact are you expecting HBM to have on PC gaming?