HiGame

Yesterday, Nvidia took the wraps off its high-end GP100 GPU and gave us a look at what its top-end HPC configuration would look like come Q1 2017. While this new card is explicitly aimed at the scientific computing market and Nvidia has said nothing about future consumer products, the information the company revealed confirms some of what we’ve privately heard about next-generation GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia.

If you’re thinking about using some of your tax rebate on a new GPU or just eyeing the market in general, we’d recommend waiting at least a few more months before pulling the trigger. It may even be worth waiting until the end of the year based on what we now know is coming down the pipe.

What to expect when you’re expecting (a new GPU)

First, a bit of review: We already know AMD is launching a new set of GPUs this summer, codenamed Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. These cores are expected to target the sweet spot of the add-in-board (AIB) market, which typically means the $199 – $299 price segment. High-end cards like the GTX 980 Ti and Fury X may command headlines, but both AMD and Nvidia ship far more GTX 960s and Radeon R7 370s than they do top-end cards.



Polaris 10 and 11 are expected to use GDDR5 rather than HBM (I’ve seen the rumors that claim some Polaris SKUs might use HBM1 — it’s technically possible, but I think it exceedingly unlikely) and AMD has said these new GPUs will improve performance-per-watt by 2.5x compared with their predecessors. The company’s next-generation Vega GPU family, which arrives late this year, is rumored to be the first ground-up new architecture since GCN debuted in 2012 with 4,096 shader cores and HBM2 memory.

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