Nvidia Puts The Accelerator To The Metal With Pascal

The revolution in GPU computing started with games, and spread to the HPC centers of the world eight years ago with the first "Fermi" Tesla accelerators from Nvidia. But hyperscalers and their deep learning algorithms are driving the architecture of the "Pascal" GPUs and the Tesla accelerators that Nvidia unveiled today at the GPU Technical Conference in its hometown of San Jose. Not only did the hyperscalers and their AI efforts help drive the Pascal architecture, but they will be the first companies to get their hands on all of the Tesla P100 accelerators based on the Pascal GP100 GPU that Nvidia can manufacture, long before they become generally available in early 2017 through server partners who make hybrid CPU-GPU systems. As was the case with the prior generations of GPU compute engines, Nvidia will eventually offer multiple versions of the Pascal GPU for specific workloads and use cases, but Nvidia has made the big bet and created its high-end GP100 variant of Pascal and making other big bets at the same time, such as moving to a 16 nanometer FinFET process from chip fab partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp and adding in High Bandwidth Memory from memory partner Samsung at the same time. Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO at Nvidia, said during his opening keynote that Nvidia has a rule about how many big bets it can make.