NVIDIA is planning to release a new card that will be based on GTX 1080's Pascal GP104-140 GPU. The video card will be called GTX 1060.
NVIDIA, which is expected to unveil the highly-anticipated GTX 1080 Ti at the CES event in January, is preparing the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, Videocardz has learned. No release date has been confirmed, although the new card is confirmed to be coming out.
According to the report, NVIDIA is actually remarketing the GP104 chips that did not meet the specifications of GTX 1080/1070 or 1070 Mobile, or those chips that did not have 1920 working CUDA Cores. Instead of getting into waste for being considered as defective, the company is repurposing them into GTX 1060.
GeForce GTX 1060 3GB is going to have higher power compared to the normal GTX 1060s that are based on GPU 106. It has 1,152 Cores and 3072 MB GDDR5 192b. The ID of the card has been found in the latest driver, which is NVIDIA_DEV.1B84 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB."
For now, the report said the new card will be released in China only. As to why the release is exclusive to China has not been explained. PCGamesN notes that this should actually be a relief to users in the United States. It wrote, "we won't have to stress about what sort of hobbled silicon is running in our hobbled 3GB versions of the proper GTX 1060. Phew."
The publication also notes that it is not a surprise that NVIDIA is making a repurpose of lower spec graphic cards based on the same GPU. For one, GPU manufacturing is an expensive business. In fact, AMD has also made new graphic cards based on the same GPU in the past.
Meanwhile, watch out for GTX 1080 Ti's unveiling at the CES event happening on Jan. 5-8 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
