Nvidia unveiled its upcoming graphics GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070, which are worth the wait. While the GTX 1070 will replace current high-end GTX 970 card, the GTX 1080 is set to be a strong alternative to the already incredible GTX 980.
An insider from the company revealed that the impressive Titan X will lag behind the latest GTX 1080. Both GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 will bring notable performance improvement to the table, and have unbeatable power efficiency. Nvidia unveiled both GPUs last week.
Nvidia has been using the 28nm transistor for many years, and now the company has switched to embrace the GPU structures with smaller transistors. The formidable GTX 1080 becomes the first GPU manufactured under TSMC's 16nm FinFET process node, according to Nvidia official website. The smaller size of the node is crucial to making the card work harder while using less power.
Rival AMD are set to execute the FinFET node process in its Polars GPU that should avail from a 14nm process. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted via Nvidia official blog that besides reduced power usage, countless enhancements were added to the new technology. For instance, the GTX 1080 sports over 7.2 billion transistors and 2560 CUDA cores clocked at 2.1 GHz.
The company notes that the GTX 1080 GPU hostlers 9 TFlops of representation performance. As a comparison, the current Nvidia GPU flagship, Titan X, has half the performance and requires considerably more juice to run.
Nvidia as well has a slightly less powerful but cost-effective GPU in store. Little is known about the GTX 1070, but Huang mentioned 6.5 TFlops of floating point functionality. As a result, this second GPU will also overtake Titan X.
AMD brought the Fiji GPU line equipped with the new HBM memory in 2015, outclassing the standard GDDR5. Nvidia opted not to use the HBM in the latest flagship hardware, but it may incorporate HBM2 memory in Pascal architecture in future. However, the manufacturer decided to include GDDR5X in its recent cards, since the memory can multiply the prefetch size by two.
The GTX 1080 packs 8 GB of GDDR5X memory, but the running clock is still under wrap. Although GDDR5X was not put in cheaper GPU, the GTX 1070 has 8 GB of memory under the hood. The lower-end GTX 1070 runs on the standard GDDR5.
Here is footage for more details.