But where the GM204 required a 398 mm^2 die size and GM200 used 601 mm^2, GP104 fits into a relatively dainty 314 mm^2. It's the latter path that Nvidia has chosen with GP104, using 7.2 billion transistors compared to GP204 at 5.2 billion, and GP200 at 8 billion. In theory, that means potentially three times as many transistors in the same area…or slightly more transistors in a much smaller area. 16nm ends up being a larger jump than normal-though after five years of using 28nm, it's not really surprising-giving a 43 percent shrink. Reducing the feature size by 33 percent (give or take) typically allows ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to cram twice as many transistors into a given area, since the transistors are shrinking in X, Y, and Z dimensions. It goes back to the process technology, which has finally moved from 28nm planar to TSMC's 16nm FinFET. The GP104 chip is half the size of the GM200 in Titan X. It has more VRAM, it includes some new features, and it's simply a significant jump in performance.
Even at $700, it's a much better value than the previous generation GTX 980 Ti.
More likely than not, the vast majority of cards at launch are going to carry a hefty price premium, at least for a few weeks, because like we said earlier: the GTX 1080 is incredibly fast. We might see some cards at MSRP come May 27, or we may see mostly/only Founders Edition cards at significantly higher prices. The problem is, we're currently ten days before the official retail launch-the Order of 10 (opens in new tab) is everywhere, it seems-which means we have no clear view on actual availability and pricing. Nvidia says their partners will produce a variety of cards, both at and above MSRP, with some even costing more than the Founders Edition. It doesn't put them into direct competition, and it allows them to sell what is otherwise a high quality graphics card to users who prefer the blower design. That would be a problem for the AIB partners, however, so Nvidia is "kindly" bumping up the price on the Founders Edition to $700 and $450. Nvidia will continue to produce these cards as long as they're manufacturing the GP104, and they'll even sell the cards under their own brand. However, Nvidia will also offer their traditional blower cooler design (with some updates), but instead of calling it the "reference card," these will now be sold as Founders Edition cards. Nvidia will work with their usual AIB (add-in board) partner cards-Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, Zotac, etc.-to offer GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards. Let's quickly talk prices, since we're on the subject. If that's still too much, the upcoming GTX 1070, slated to launch on June 10, should roughly match the Titan X performance with an MSRP of $380. Oh, and it also uses less power, at just 180W, while carrying an MSRP of $600. The result is a chip that has 2560 FP32 CUDA cores, uses 7.2 billion transistors, and it outperforms the previous king, the GTX Titan X by a sizeable margin. GP100 is a large chip, HBM2 is far more expensive than GDDR5/GDDR5X, and FP64 isn't something that's used or needed for gaming. If you're wondering about these differences, the main goal appears to be reducing cost and improving efficiency. For those who want more information, we've previously discussed the initial details of the GTX 1080, some of the new features and software, and explained the Founders Edition. Here's a spoiler: the card is damn fast, and even at the Founders Edition price of $699, it's still extremely impressive.
ULTRA FP64 FREE
If you're not really concerned about what makes the GTX 1080 tick, feel free to skip down about 2000 words to the charts, where we'll show performance against the current crop of graphics cards. And then we waited a few days for Nvidia to ship us drivers, benchmarked a bunch of games, and prepared for today, the day where we can officially talk performance, architecture, and some other new features. We were also given a deep dive into the Pascal GP104 architecture at the heart of the graphics card, and we left for home with a shiny new GTX 1080 box tucked safely in our luggage. What really happened is that we had several hours over the next day to try out some demos and hardware, all running on the GTX 1080.