First Look: NVIDIA Next Gen Turing GeForce GTX Prototype Card Spotted
A few days after NVIDIA posted a birthday message to Alan Turing on Twitter (and perhaps teasing that what its next generation GeForce GPUs will be called), a picture of purported prototype GeForce card appeared on the web (shown above). If the picture is legitimate, then it is the first look at an upcoming GeForce GTX Turing card with what is presumed to be GDDR6 memory and a few other bits.
The card appeared on Reddit and drew a bit of buzz on the Internet before the post was ultimately deleted. This being the Internet and all, once the cat is out of the bag, there is no putting it back in. The picture shows a clearly unfinished product with a placeholder for the GPU, four small fans plopped around the GPU area, and no heatsink assembly. What you can see, however, are a dozen Micron GDDR6 memory chips
Happy Birthday to Alan Turing, the remarkable pioneer of #computerscience. https://t.co/0n4Zb5KkLm #onthisday pic.twitter.com/DJZyLah0GE
— NVIDIA (@nvidia) June 23, 2018
Just yesterday, Micron announced that it had begun mass producing next generation 8-gigabite (Gb) GDDR6 memory chips for use in a broad range of applications, including artificial intelligence (AI), networking, automotive, and of graphics processing units. That is presumed to include NVIDIA's unannounced GeForce GTX 20 series based on an architecture that is rumored to be called Turing.
"Micron is a pioneer in developing advanced high bandwidth memory solutions and continues that leadership with GDDR6. Micron demonstrated this leadership by recently achieving throughput up to 20GB/s on our GDDR6 solutions," Micron said at the time. "In addition to performance increases, Micron has developed a deep partner ecosystem to enable rapid creation of GDDR6 designs, enabling faster time to market for customers looking to leverage this powerful new memory technology."
Click to Enlarge (Source: Micron)
Bearing in mind that nothing is official, the presumed prototype hints at NVIDIA releasing a SKU with 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 384-bit bus. Depending on the speed of the chips, we could be looking at memory bandwidth in the range of 672GB/s. For comparison, a Titan V with HBM2 memory serves up 652.8GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Other notable bits include three 8-pin PCI Express power connectors in the upper right corner. Whether the finished product will feature the same arrangement remains to be seen (we doubt it), but it's also worth noting that this could be a prototype of a next generation Quadro card as well.
All will be made clear soon enough—NVIDIA is scheduled to talk about its next generation GeForce GPUs at the Hot Chips conference in August. It's also possible that NVIDIA will have announced something before then, with some rumors pointing to a July launch.
