Friday, October 19th 2018
NVIDIA Rushes in GTX 1060 with GDDR5X to Counter AMD Radeon RX 590 Threat
AMD is giving final touches to its Radeon RX 590 graphics card, which is rumored to be based on an efficient new rendition of the "Polaris" silicon, which could disturb NVIDIA's product lineup between the GTX 1060 series and the GTX 1070, as its new RTX 2060 series is nowhere in sight. In a bid to thwart this threat, NVIDIA is preparing a variant of the GeForce GTX 1060 with faster GDDR5X memory.
The current GTX 1060 6 GB is endowed with 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory, which at its 192-bit bus width works out to a memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s. NVIDIA had attempted to improve its competitive position once, by creating a shortlived sub-variant of this SKU with 9 Gbps GDDR5 memory (211 GB/s). Switching to 10 Gbps GDDR5X memory would give the chip 240 GB/s memory bandwidth, and 11 Gbps (unlikely because expensive), would yield 264 GB/s. With the GP106 silicon maxed out, it's also possible the new GTX 1060 could be based on a heavily cut down GP104, possibly even with 192-bit memory, which explains GDDR5X memory.
Source:
NVIDIA
The current GTX 1060 6 GB is endowed with 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory, which at its 192-bit bus width works out to a memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s. NVIDIA had attempted to improve its competitive position once, by creating a shortlived sub-variant of this SKU with 9 Gbps GDDR5 memory (211 GB/s). Switching to 10 Gbps GDDR5X memory would give the chip 240 GB/s memory bandwidth, and 11 Gbps (unlikely because expensive), would yield 264 GB/s. With the GP106 silicon maxed out, it's also possible the new GTX 1060 could be based on a heavily cut down GP104, possibly even with 192-bit memory, which explains GDDR5X memory.
98 Comments on NVIDIA Rushes in GTX 1060 with GDDR5X to Counter AMD Radeon RX 590 Threat
Poor G92.
Card won't be super fast anyway and potential customers might rather choose 1070 instead...
Well am I the only one who's missing the point of this step?
It sounds weird, yes, it could also be to deplete stock.
So many remakes, and not a single relevant new card.
AMD's Vega almost doesn't even exists, Nvidia's RTX 20 series not much better with huge price increase for current game tech.
And instead of making a decent, fresh mid-range card, they are all just rolling their ~3 years old tech.
There are some close calls, the MX150 with different TDP for example. But, like I said, the lower TDP is to fit in the designs of the laptop, and the higher TDP version would just throttle to match the lower if it was put in those computers anyway. They are not innocent, for sure, and really I don't like what they did with the 1060s, the naming definitely could have been better.
It would be like saying "The GT 1030 is endowed with DDR4."
:shadedshu:,
Liquid Cool
While is/was said the GDDR5X was slightly more efficient vs. throughput could we think Nvidia will raise GPU clocks or on this memory? Another question... so the Nvidia GP106 memory controller had always has been configured and set-up to permit GDDR5X, or is this chip being re-spun to allow this?
Lastly, Nvidia AIB's surly aren't liking this... As moving to GDDR5X means all new PCB layouts as it requires 190 pins per chip position, verses 170 pins for current GDDR5. So that's probably going to make such models more pricey, killing any bang-for-buck! Somehow this is not looking good.
Oh well, perhaps we aren't getting anything new and exciting until this time next year. But both sides are stringing-us-out 3-4 years now for any mainstream GPU offering just sucks!