If they stick with tradition, and use the existing
Nvidia Volta GPU technology, then the GTX 1180 will arrive sporting a GV104 GPU, but just what sort of configuration that chip might have is still up for debate.
The Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) of the current Volta chip is chock full of silicon designed for machine learning and inference, and how much of that will make the transition over to the gaming GPU we don’t yet know.
With the Pascal generation, Nvidia stripped out the double precision cores for the GP104 silicon, and they may do the same with Volta. Historically they would then push the SMs together - with the GP100, for example, there were 10 SMs in a general processing cluster (GPC) and then just five in a GP104 GPC, despite having the same number of CUDA cores in each cluster. Each SM then has double the cores sharing the same instruction cache and shared memory.
I’m not sure that will work out the same for a gaming Volta SM, as there is still some silicon inside the current Volta design which will come in useful in games which take advantage of the new
DirectX Raytracing from Microsoft and the Volta-specific RTXtech from Nvidia themselves. That’s not likely to be stripped out, so the final gaming SM structure might be very similar to the current GV100 design.
That’s not just limited to the new Tensor cores, but that new silicon definitely helps in cleaning up a raytraced image. And that means, despite what we initially expected, gaming Volta cards could still come with Tensor cores in the package. With
WinMLalso looking to bring machine learning into the gaming space we’re likely to see more pro-level silicon remaining in our gaming GPUs in the future.
But we think it’s probably quite likely Nvidia would stick with the same overall GPC structure, and switch to four GPCs for a potential GV104 design. That would give the GTX 1180 a total of 3,584 CUDA cores and 224 texture units, which would give a nice symmetry with the GTX 1080 Ti it would likely replace.
