Nvidia Pascal MIA at CES, reportedly in trouble

Nvidia’s Pascal MIA at CES, reportedly in trouble

 

Nvidia’s Pascal was MIA at CES and their Pascal powered Drive PX2 display unit has is likely to be using Maxwell Silicon. Is Nvidia’s Pascal having unexpected delays?

The Drive PX2 module that Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang held a board that allegedly contains two Maxwell based GTX 980 MXM modules instead of new Pascal Silicon, as is evident by the dates and numbers that are inscribed on the chips. 

While working Pascal silicon is not required for the purposes of this display unit, since the demonstration was primarily to show the form factor of the device, it does raise some doubts that Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs will be coming within the next 6 months. 

This brings back a lot of memories to the delay of Fermi back in 2009, where Jen-Hsun held a mock up board and claimed that Fermi was in full production for a Christmas release, but in fact Nvidia were having trouble producing the chips and Fermi had to be released in late March 2010. 

 

      These issues with Pascal and the Drive PX 2 echo the Fermi “wood screw” even of 2009. Back then, Jen-Hsun held up a Fermi board that was nothing but a mock-up, proclaimed the chip was in full production, and would launch before the end of the year. In reality, NV was having major problems with GF100 and the GPU only launched in late March, 2010.

  

We know that AMD had shown working Polaris Silicon at CES and that Nvidia have not said anything related to their upcoming Pascal series of GPUs, suggesting that Nvidia are either trying to hide something, or simply that they wanted to focus on the automotive industry during CES.

Nvidia and AMD are using very different manufacturing/ process nodes for this generation of GPUs, so it is possible that Nvidia are having issues with TSMC’s 16nm FinFET processing node, where AMD are having relatively few issues using Global Foundries 14nm FinFET processing node.  

 

(Image of a section of the Nvidia PX2 module beside the GTX 980M (From Videocardz))

 

Right not it cannot be confirmed if Pascal has been delayed or if Nvidia are having manufacturing issues, but the lack of information from Nvidia is indeed concerning. 

One thing to note is that Nvidia’s silence regarding Pascal could easily be in order to maximize sales of Maxwell powered GPUs before release, as drumming up hype for Pascal could convince a lot of consumers to delay upgrading their GPUs. 

Right now all that can really be said is that Nvidia may not have been ready to showcase Pascal yet, so anything further reaching than that is merely speculation. 

 

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