back to article Nvidia unveils Pascal, its next-gen GPU with hella-fast interconnects and 3D packaging

Nvidia has announced its next-generation GPU, and with it a new interconnect it dubs NVLink that it says will increase the bandwidth among GPUs – and also CPUs, should a processor designer implement it – over that of PCIe by five to twelve times. Nvidia NVLink block diagram String a bunch of GPUs together with NVLink, and …

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  1. Jock in a Frock
    Joke

    But...

    ... will it run Crysis?

  2. Richard 12 Silver badge
    Joke

    Can I write in Pascal for Pascal?

    Or would that cause an infinite loop of headdesk?

    1. Oninoshiko
      Joke

      Re: Can I write in Pascal for Pascal?

      No, but you can write fortran in any language.

  3. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Heat?

    Don't graphics cards already have enough of a problem with heat? So won't stacking chips just make waste heat harder as there's less surface area? Or are they going to implement some kind of inter-layer heat extraction?

  4. gizmo23

    TSV

    Didn't nVidia have a bit of a problem with through-vias a while ago? Presumably they've got past those issues now. My memories of the bump thing's a bit hazy, anyone else remember details?

    1. Roo

      Re: TSV

      Got to wonder what the yields & MTBF (at package level) are going to be like with zillions of TSVs hooking up a bunch of hot dies.

      Best of luck to them. :)

  5. GL1zdA

    Volta

    Wasn't the codename Volta the last time they were talking about it?

  6. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    Interesting news

    Memory bandwidth (also between CPU and GPU) is a major bottleneck, and designing algorithms to minimize data traffic over these buses is sometimes very difficult. Higher bandwidth should make designing algorithms for these machines less of a hassle.

  7. phil dude
    Boffin

    randomly connected...

    I did a presentation a few years back on the "commodity version of Anton" (Anton is MD pecial purpose hardware.

    I have a slide which compares the PCIx vs Hypertransport characterisics, and why D.E.Shaw built their own.

    This would seem to be a natural evolution and the reinvention of the Video bus...

    P.

  8. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    5 to 12x the PCIe bandwidth

    Humongous strides are still being made in the computing space. This is another stepping stone towards more and more computing power available to individual users. I can hardly wait to see this become a reality.

    I wonder what kind of eye-candy future game developers will throw in to make their plotless games look even better. Maybe some kind of mix between Battlefield 6 and Minecraft ? Truly deformable terrain and structures without any scripting ? Bodies and rubble that stay for the duration of the round ? Blood spurting out of severed arteries ?

    Who knows, we might even get a game with an actual plot ?

  9. Paul J Turner

    As IBM predicted long ago...

    3D packaging, LOTS of interconnects, then a lot of heat to dissipate.

    Here we are finally at the 'Hairy, smoking Golf-ball'.

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