We already had a woodscrew-moment with Drive PX2 equipped with Maxwells instead of claimed Pascals
Question is: were those old chips actually 20nm Paxwells ?
Highly unlikely. Manufactured in week 03, year 2015.
How likely do you think it is that NVIDIA cooked up 20nm "paxwell" in week 3 of 2015 with the exact same pcb and die size as GM204?
Since Fermi, we've seen chips from xx4 through xx8 and xx9 (plus one highly cut-down GF100) in the laptop space, so a priori the "Pascal for laptops" could be almost any chip(s). But my guess is that we'll see a low-end Pascal or two to replace the majority of mobile GM107 and GM108 parts.
At least the die size
If the focus is in mobile and mainstream, it's an uphill climb already in terms of market and mindshare. So it might be a proportionally smaller Osborne-ing.
They also, once again, mix GDDR5X into the rumour, even though only GDDR5X manufacturer has said that mass production will start "during summer" (and once they specified August)
So much for 'hack'.
It sounded like somebody with foot in mouth disease like Roy Taylor would say!If that was the focus, he definitely went out of his way to not make that subtle distinction.
The thing that surprises me more is not that Nvidia would have something available by mid year, but that AMD was so conservative with their Polaris availability, showing samples to the press in December and all that.
A Polaris 11 should be able to challenge most of their current product line, all the way up to a 390X, in terms of performance, right?
We haven't had a good silly season in years now, and still both AMD and NV are closed up tight like clams without giving us anything substantial. One can only hope there will be some kind of infodump come GDC...
It could threaten that portion of the stack, and possibly higher. AMD could opt to hamstring it in some way so that it chokes at the "4K" marketing line.
I don't think that's a major problem: introduce a 1070 with GDDR5 first, add a 1080 with GDDR5X a few months later.
