We’ve now seen a new Titan, a 1080, a 1070 and a 1060. Rumours about a 1080 Ti right now are hot right now too.
The bottom end of the range has been strangely quiet however. It’s a pity, since it’s not just horsepower that the new architecture and smaller process has brought to the GPU market. In one generation Nvidia has essentially made PSUs over 600W a bit redundant for single-GPU systems.
For the first time, the mobile versions of current generation GPUs as the same silicon with performance nearly on-par with the desktop versions. Only heat and power holding them back and then only by 10% or less. It’s the first honest revolution we’ve seen for more than a decade.
Soon we will see the first mid-range entrant into the market from the new generation from Nvidia, namely the 1050.
It seems that we’ll see the 1050 and it Ti version will both be launching on the 25th of October. So if you are about to buy a new mid-range workstation or laptop, hang on just a little while.
Vanilla Specs The vanilla 1050 has been the subject of a few spec leaks. Obviously until the card is released in two weeks we can’t say that these specs are accurate, but the closer we get to the release date the more trustworthy these rumours tend to be.
The 1050 is likely to be based on the same new FINFET process that gave is a new Titan and the GTX 1080, but the chip will be all new and not a cut down version of a higher end card. The likely name for the new chip is “GP107” and it will be the smallest Pascal GPU unless Nvidia decides to make new silicon for lower-end models.
This 1050 will apparently have 640 CUDA cores running at a base clock of 1.35 Ghz. This should be accompanied by 2GB of 7Ghz GDDR5. The bus will only be 128-bit, so the bandwidth is estimated at 112GB/s. For 1080p gaming and midrange workstation loads, that’s actually a fair amount of power, but the real kicker is that all of this only requires a 75W TDP. This means that the GPU should need no external power. For a likely $120 that’s a great deal.
Titanium Dreams The card of real interest here is the 1050 Ti. The card is likely to retail around the $150 mark, which is a hotly contested price zone. It seems the 1050 Ti will feature 768 CUDA cores and a 1.39Ghz clock speed. 4GB of GDDR5 and an extra 0.3 TFLOPS of performance, bringing the card to 2.1 TFLOPs in total.
We have to remember the GTX 960, which was a $200 card with 2.3 TFLOPS and a 120W TDP. It seems the 1050 Ti may be a step back in pure processing power, but the new Pascal architecture and new APIs such as Vulcan and DirectX 12 can do more with less. Ultimately benchmarks of real-world applications will show whether this is a good card to go for or not.
