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Published in Graphics

Pascal to come as PCIe and Mezzanine

by on01 April 2014


 
300W from board

We managed to meet up with Sumit Gupta, the General manager of Nvidia's Tesla business and we managed to learn a few more details about the future products such as Pascal. In addition to novel features like 3D stacked RAM, we learned a bit more about the new form factor called Mezzanine. In case you are not familiar with this connector, you can see it here.

The next generation Pascal computational Tesla-market card will come in two formats, one PCIe 3.0 and second in Mezzanine form factor that is flat, more stable and significantly smaller than the PCIe 3.0 graphics card form factor. This was the card that Jen-Hsun Huang chose at the keynote and was so happy about the fact that it is one third of a PCIe card size.

The new Pascal card will be used in servers and we are not sure if it will make its way to Pascal gaming and workstation hardware, at least not in Mezzanine form. The new format becomes interesting as with the bottom connector you can feed the board with up to 300W power. This means that there won’t be any necessity for external power connectors even for the highest end computer modules, graphics cards, Tesla cards, Quadro cards. This sounds rather interesting and innovative.

We could not find out if the Mezzanine will make it to the desktop graphics card market but we can certainly see a potential use for such a format in small form factor machines.

All the memory is on the package of the card surrounded by some power elements but 3D stacked memory and Pascal GPU are in one packaging, and this is the reason why bandwidth will be up to 2.5 times faster than anything before. The Mezzanine connector and 300W maximum is a nice touch too.

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