NVIDIA’s GP100 Pascal GPUs to feature 4-Hi HBM2 and a 4096-bit memory bus

As impressive as AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X2 will undoubtedly be, especially given how well multiple Radeon R9 Fury X’s scale, all eyes have turned to NVIDIA in anticipation of their latest and greatest, next generation GP100 GPU, Pascal.

Much like the Radeon R9 Fury X and the rest of the Fiji range, NVIDIA’s Pascal GPUs are set to make use of massive 4096-bit memory busses.

Moreover, NVIDIA will also make use of HBM memory in their latest flagship series, only they’ll be adopting the second generation of HBM, HBM2.

Hynix HBM & HBM2 Specifications. 256GB/s is, well, massive.

HBM2 promises significant performance as well as capacity enhancements over HBM and will allow NVIDIA to stack DRAM dies 4-Hi on their consumer-level GP100 GPUs. Their industrial-grade, professional Quadro and TESLA GPUs will receive 8-Hi stacks.

Keep in mind that with 4-Hi HBM2 running at 1GHz on a 4096-bit memory bus, Pascal is set to have an absurd throughput – we’re talking the same levels of bandwidth Jean-Luc Picard had to make use of on his Sovereign-class USS Enterprise starship.

It’s why NVIDIA’s roadmap has Pascal, in comparison to older technology, in a league of its own.

Throw in Pascal’s TSMC 16nm FinFET process, allowing for significantly denser and more power efficient GPUs than was possible on Maxwell 2’s 28nm process, and you have a heck of a lot of potential under the GP100’s hood.

TSMC’s 16FF+ (FinFET Plus) technology can provide above 65 percent higher speed, around 2 times the density, or 70 percent less power than its 28HPM technology. Comparing with 20SoC technology, 16FF+ provides extra 40% higher speed and 60% power saving. By leveraging the experience of 20SoC technology, TSMC 16FF+ shares the same metal backend process in order to quickly improve yield and demonstrate process maturity for time-to-market value.”

And just because that’s not nearly enough for NVIDIA, Pascal will sport their newly developed NVLink technology, allowing for 5 to 12x faster transfer speeds than traditional PCIE 3.0 between the GPU and the rest of the PC.

NVIDIA® NVLink™ is a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that enables ultra-fast communication between the CPU and GPU, and between GPUs. The technology allows data sharing at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe Gen3 interconnect, resulting in dramatic speed-ups in application performance and creating a new breed of high-density, flexible servers for accelerated computing.”

It should offer significant improvements for home PCs too.