NVIDIA to refresh Pascal GPU architecture in 2017

A treasure trove of details on NVIDIA's GPU plans for 2017 and beyond have surfaced, courtesy of Baidu user USG Ishimura, who said that there is a Pascal refresh on the way, which will be followed by Volta, and so much more.

Starting with the Pascal 2.0 refresh, which will supposedly see more GPUs released on the GP102 core, meaning cheaper versions of the incredibly fast Titan X and GTX 1080 graphics cards. This is similar to what NVIDIA did with the GTX 700 series based on the Kepler architecture. NVIDIA recently inked a deal with Samsung to have their Pascal architecture made on the 14nm FinFET process, with the current Pascal cards being made on the 16nm FinFET node by TSMC.

Micron has been providing the super-fast GDDR5X clocked at 10GHz for the GTX 1080 and Titan X, but the yields didn't start well, and will only improve as we get closer to the purported Pascal refresh. GDDR5X would find its way onto the entire Pascal refresh, except for the entry-level GP107-based cards. NVIDIA has also had its 16nm-based Pascal cards hitting 2GHz GPU clocks easily, so we could see GPU Boost 3.0 keeping the clock speeds higher than we have now, allowing for proper differentiation between AIB partner cards.