NVDIA Pascal Update: CEO Jen Hsun Huang Could Showcase New Architecture On Tuesday

Gamers and pixel maniacs may be in for a treat later today as NVDIA is set to showcase its next-gen GPU architecture, named Pascal.

Rumors of Pascal have been around for a while, peaking at the start of this month as the GPU Technology Conference is underway. One of the conference's keynote speakers is NVDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang, who is expected to take the lid off of Pascal, the company's technology transition from 28 nm fabrication to 16 nm.

What we know about Pascal suggests it is nothing short of a revolution; bandwidths up to 1 TB/s, higher power efficiencies and VRAM up to 16 GB! The new fabrication process is expected to improve performance through smaller chips without compromising power efficiency. It seems games would have to do the catching up after all.

The Pascal prototypes first surfaced at CES 2016. Though analysts believe Pascal could largely be restricted to the HPC market, it could find its way to the machines of gamers who spare no expense, if NVDIA releases a suitable mainstream desktop or laptop edition. That said, NVDIA's 2016 releases for gaming could be the launch of GPUs with GDDR5X memory that boasts of bandwidth twice GDDR5.

New images that surfaced online recently claim to show Pascal based cards named GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. While NVDIA has not provided a confirmation or revealed the names of its next-gen GPUs, it is reasonable to assume that these names could be the company's flagship GDDR5X cards. These cards could be released later in May, reports suggest.

Huang's keynote on Tuesday at GTC is expected to throw light on Pascal and the company's plans to take on rival AMD's 2016 GPUs.