And finally the GTX 1060 GDDR5X shenanigans make sense.



It's simple: NVIDIA has stopped selling GTX 1080 GPUs to board partners, because big green wants to push Turing as hard as they can and GTX 1080 performs too close to RTX 2070 for their liking. One problem: board partners are sitting on large stocks of GTX 1080 PCBs and GTX 1080 GDDR5X memory because they wanted to make GTX 1080s (due to both ordinary demand and the crypto boom that flopped), and now NVIDIA isn't letting them, and they're understandably unhappy.



Solution: rework existing, lower-performance SKUs to use the GTX 1080 PCBs, GPUs and memory and hence deplete partners' inventories. Thus the GTX 1060 GDDR5X, which uses a cut-down GTX 1080 GPU, and now this "GTX 1070 GDDR5X". This is also why neither of these "new" SKUs take advantage of the extra speed of the GDDR5X they're using: NVIDIA doesn't want them to perform better than the GDDR5 originals (which would potentially pressure Turing, as well as make everyone who owns the GDDR5 versions of these cards unhappy).



It's a pretty ingenious solution to an (admittedly self-created) problem, and it should be a win for consumers in the know: unless NVIDIA pulls some shenanigans around overclocking, the GTX 1060 GDDR5X and "GTX 1070 GDDR5X" will easily hit 10Gbps on their memory, which will offer a tangible, although not huge, performance gain. And the use of GTX 1080 boards, with their beefed-up power circuitry, should also allow more stable and higher core overclocks.



At the end of the day, though, board partners are still going to be losing money selling what are essentially GTX 1080s at GTX 1060/1070 prices, and I assume NVIDIA will be picking up the tab for that, so I expect to see a substantial "inventory writedown" or similar charge in NVIDIA's next quarterly results report.



Which brings up another interesting question: are the prices of Turing so high only because NVIDIA is greedy, or was this writedown cost already factored into them from the start?

Posted on Dec 5th 2018, 3:43 Reply