NVIDIA Pascal to get PCIe and Mezzanine form factors

FUD Zilla received confirmation from NVIDIA that the stacked 3D memory that will be part of the Pascal chip will not be an in-house design. The memory will come on the same package as the Parker chip and will be in the multiple gigabytes range, similar to the usual amount of stacked memory for a 2016 GPU or computational part. The exact bandwidth of the 3D stacked memory is unclear but it should be around 2.5x faster than what we see today.

Stacked 3D RAM will be the only memory on the board and we were told that there is no need for additional memory in the form of BGA chips that we see on today’s graphics cards. All the memory comes as 3D stacked RAM and it's powered by NV Link, so it should be able to "talk" to the GPU at very high speeds.

The site also heard details regarding Pascal's form factor. NVIDIA Tesla GM Sumit Gupta revealed that Pascal will arrive in two form factors; the usual PCI Express but also a new type of card named Mezzanine. This was the card that NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off at the keynote, it's a third of a PCIe card size and has a bottom connector that can feed the board with up to 300W.

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.