Sony forcing Nvidia hand?

[vivster]

Slimebeast said:

vivster said:

You really wonder why? Pascal is nothing more than a massively overclocked Maxwell. 95% of the performance boost over Maxwell comes from the clock and not the architecture. It's harder to overclock something that's already so high clocked. For example the 1080 has 10% less shaders than the 980ti but to make up for it has a whooping 60% higher clock.

How can it be just Maxwell on a smaller process if Nvidia boasted at the reveal that the research budget for the 1080 was billions of dollars and their most expensive GPU to develop ever?

A lot of that research went to Volta and the most expensive part of it was the shrink which is always very expensive. Increasing yields and optimizing manufacturing techniques always takes a lot of time and money.

The architectural move from Kepler to Maxwell was a gigantic leap and showed what kind of performance you still could get in the old 28nm process. The change from Maxwell to Pascal is basically nothing. Volta will be the next big leap. It will not have the same performance jump but it will lay the groundwork for optimizing the 16nm process and finally feature HBM2 for mainstream cards, one of the most important components when it comes to 4k and above. It will most likely feature around the same clocks so it's basically forced to innovate in chip design to gain performance over Pascal.

Compare it to Intel's Tick Tock model where they basically change nothing at the shrink but will still get better performance and greater efficiency through clock and packing density.