Tech-savvy fans have been eager to experience the new Pascal series of GPUs ever since NVIDIA showcased the new cards at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, held last month. Reportedly, there is a reason for this as NVIDIA used next-gen technology that makes its new set of GPUs a step ahead of others, particularly their competitor AMD.
According to MNRDaily, the Pascal series is able to use High Bandwidth Memory – Generation 2 (HBM2) in its architecture. This means that in terms of bandwidth allocation, it will have at least three times the speed of and twice as much memory capacity as the first-gen HBM.
This is good news to NVIDIA graphics fans, and might be a worrying one for others, particularly AMD. The latest in AMD's lineup, the R9 Fury X, featuring the latest Fiji GPU architecture, was unveiled last year with HBM1.
In a report by Fudzilla last year, the industry follower noted that the new GPUs by the company only allow limited capacity for memory, which might be the reason why the Fiji GPUs currently available feature dual-GPU design of 4 GB each, for a total of 8 GB per GPU. HBM 2 by NVIDIA, on the other hand, can carry as much as 32 GB of onboard memory.
The report added that while NVDIA is ready to drop its HBM2-ready products in the Pascal series, AMD will only transition to the next-gen memory architecture this year. This means that HBM2-capable AMD GPUs will launch later in 2016 onwards.
As for the release date of the NVIDIA Pascal GPUs, some observers are saying that it might launch early this year, since it was already showcased at a major tech event. It has been rumored that the new NVIDIA GPUs might arrive as early as April, and will reportedly replace the Titan-grade series of graphics cards.
