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The leaks keep coming! Now we have pics of the GP104 and GP106 chips.

NVIDIA Pascal GP104 pictured up close

http://videocardz.com/58986/nvidia-pascal-gp104-pictured-up-close

First things first, how do we know this is GP104? According to my quick research, none of the GPUs I saw looks like this one. Also, the memory chips that were pictured alongside GPU are Samsung’s GDDR5 8Gb 8Gbps chips, which were not used for any graphics cards before.

Now you might have the same impression as I do, that the photo is slightly distorted. So the first thing we need to do is to fix aspect ratio and adjust the perspective in reference to GDDR5 module, which is usually 12*14mm. From there we can easily calculate the area of GPU die simply by comparing it to memory module.

According to my calculations the area of the die is 310 mm2. According to the leaker it’s even less (290-300 mm2). Both numbers are smaller than I suspected, but it seems enough to fit four Graphics Processing Clusterers, especially since GP104 does not need as many memory controllers as GP100. Now assuming that GP104 has the same density of FP32 CUDA cores as Big Pascal, then it should have 2560 cores in total. Meanwhile transistor count should be no less than 8 billion, quite an upgrade over GM204’s 5.2 billion.

 

NVIDIA Pascal GP106 GPU pictured up close

http://videocardz.com/58973/nvidia-pascal-gp106-gpu-pictured-up-close

At GTC 2016 Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, realized that showing Maxwell chips instead of Pascal may have some funny consequences. The spy cameras are always zoomed in to show all details of any device that is shown on stage. This time Jen-Hsun presented the real Drive PX 2 module, it was definitely equipt with new Pascal GPUs, however it was only for a very brief moment and many journalists missed the opportunity to take better pictures. Later, the same board was hidden under translucent box in NVIDIA’s booth, but it was presenting Tegra side instead of the back with MXM boards.

Still, some journalists tried to take pictures at any angle possible, just to catch more details on new Pascal GPU. This is how Hardware.fr and Heise.de teams brought us some material to work with.

First we learn that the new board called PG418 is not desktop solution. It’s Pascal-based MXM module. This could be either new GeForce GTX 1060M or some fancy Quadro chip. I think this is GP106 for two reasons. First of all this chip is simply too big to be GP107. Secondly I don’t remember any GM107 based card in MXM format, so it’s unlikely that its successor would need it.

Now, speaking of the size, the area of this die is somewhere between 170-200 mm2. It is definitely smaller than GM206 (227 mm2), but also bigger than ‘typical’ size for entry-level GPU (more here).

To give you some idea how Pascal GPUs could look on the inside, look at the diagram below. The rectangular nature of this GPU could suggest that we have two Graphics Processing Clusters right next to each other. If both of them have 5 streaming multiprocessors, then according to how Pascal architecture the full chip should have 1280 CUDA cores.

 

At this rate, by the time Nvidia launches them we'll know almost everything from Pascal .