NVIDIA Pascal Next-Gen GPU Platform Revealed

NVIDIA has announced Pascal, its next-gen GPU platform for gaming PCs, cloud computing, supercomputing, and machine learning. Featuring new technologies NVLink and 3D Memory, Pascal introduces new strategies to increase performance in NVIDIA's next-gen graphics chips. The new reference board is just 1/3 size of PCI express.

3D Memory stacks chips for the first time in NVIDIA's GPUs, using Chip-on-Wafer integration to increase capacity by 2.5x and increase energy efficiency by 4x, not to mention an exponential increase in memory bandwidth.

As for NVLink, that promises to increase speeds by 5-12x over PCIe by dramatically increasing the speed between CPU and GPU. In doing so, it minimizes the time that the GPU has to wait for data to be processed.

Moving forward, NVIDIA will still support PCIe, but it will enable NVLink for any compatible CPUs in systems where Pascal boards are installed.

The new platform is named after Blaise Pascal, who died in 1662, and the genius behind Pascal's Theorem, Pascal's Law, and Probability Theory. He also created the mechanical calculator.

NVIDIA expects Pascal to be available by 2016.