Pascal (microarchitecture)

Pascal is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, as the successor to the Maxwell architecture. The architecture was first introduced in April 2016 with the release of the Tesla P100 (GP100) on April 5, 2016, and is primarily used in the GeForce 10 series, starting with the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 (both using the GP104 GPU), which were released on May 17, 2016, and June 10, 2016, respectively. Pascal was manufactured using TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process, and later Samsung's 14 nm FinFET process. The architecture is named after the 17th century French mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal. In April 2019, Nvidia enabled a software implementation of DirectX Raytracing on Pascal-based cards starting with the GTX 1060 6 GB, and in the 16 series cards, a feature reserved to the Turing-based RTX series up to that point. In March 2014, Nvidia announced that the successor to Maxwell would be the Pascal microarchitecture; announced on May 6, 2016, and released on May 27 of the same year. The Tesla P100 (GP100 chip) has a different version of the Pascal architecture compared to the GTX GPUs (GP104 chip). The shader units in GP104 have a Maxwell-like design. Architectural improvements of the GP100 architecture include the following: In Pascal, an SM (streaming multiprocessor) consists of between 64-128 CUDA cores, depending on if it is GP100 or GP104. Maxwell packed 128, Kepler 192, Fermi 32 and Tesla only 8 CUDA cores into an SM; the GP100 SM is partitioned into two processing blocks, each having 32 single-precision CUDA Cores, an instruction buffer, a warp scheduler, 2 texture mapping units and 2 dispatch units. CUDA Compute Capability 6.0. High Bandwidth Memory 2 — some cards feature 16 GiB HBM2 in four stacks with a total of 4096-bit bus with a memory bandwidth of 720 GB/s. Unified memory — a memory architecture, where the CPU and GPU can access both main system memory and memory on the graphics card with the help of a technology called "Page Migration Engine".