NVIDIA Drops Pascal Bomb With GP102-Based TITAN X, 60 Percent Faster Than Its Predecessor

NVIDIA has historically taken a somewhat different approach when announcing its newest Titan-branded graphics cards, that differs from the measured, methodical launches of its more mainstream consumer products.

Tonight’s announcement, however, takes the cake. We just received details from NVIDIA regarding an upcoming ultra-powerful, Pascal-based Titan X, featuring a 12 billion transistor GPU, codenamed GP102. The email’s subject began with “SURPRISE” and the body started with, “It began with a bet”.


NVIDIA is obviously having a little fun with this one.

At an artificial intelligence meet-up at Stanford University this evening, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang first announced, and then actually GAVE AWAY a few brand new, Pascal-based NVIDIA TITAN X GPUs, much to the surprise of those in attendance.

Apparently, Brian Kelleher, one of NVIDIA’s top hardware engineers, made a bet with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, that the company could squeeze 10 teraflops of computing performance out of a single chip. Jen-Hsun thought that was not doable in this generation of product, but apparently, Brian and his team pulled it off.

The bet was for $1. Randolf and Mortimer would be proud.

The new Titan X is powered by NVIDIA’s largest GPU; the company says it’s actually the biggest GPU ever built – period. The Pascal-based GP102 features 3,584 CUDA cores, clocked at 1.53GHz (the previous-gen Titan X has 3,072 CUDA cores clocked at 1.08GHz). Over and above the core counts, however, this new Titan X also benefits from the updated Pascal architecture. In terms of its design, it’s got a very similar aesthetic to the GeForce GTX 1080, but there’s lot more going on under the hood.

The specifications NVIDIA has released thus far include:

• 12-billion transistors
• 11 TFLOPs FP32 (32-bit floating point)
• 44 TOPS INT8 (new deep learning inferencing instruction)
• 3,584 CUDA cores at 1.53GHz
• High performance engineering for maximum overclocking
• 12GB of GDDR5X memory (480GB/s)

And here's how the specs of the new beast map out versus previous and current generation NVIDIA high-end GPUs:

	TITAN X (New)	GTX 1080	GTX 980 Ti	TITAN X (Old)	GTX 980
NVIDIA GPU	GP102	GP104	GM200	GM200	GM204
Architecture	Pascal	Pascal	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell
Number of Cores	3584	2560	2816	3072	2048
Core Clock	1417 MHz	1607 MHz	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	1126 MHz
Memory	12GB	8GB	6GB	12GB	4GB
Memory Clock	10000 MHz	10000 MHz	7000 MHz	7000 MHz	7000 MHz
Memory Interface	384-bit G5X	256-bit G5X	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	480 GB/s	320 GB/s	336 GB/s	336 GB/s	224 GB/s
TDP	250 watts	180 watts	250 watts	250 watts	165 watts
Peak Compute	11.0 TFLOPS	8.2 TFLOPS	5.63 TFLOPS	6.14 TFLOPS	4.61 TFLOPS
Transistor Count	12B	7.2B	8.0B	8.0B	5.2B
Process Tech	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET	28nm	28nm	28nm
MSRP	$1,200	$599	$649	$999	$499