NVIDIA Begins Teasing A TITAN X ‘Collector’s Edition’

When rumors of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti first dropped, it felt like the collective internet had the same question: “Where does that fit in?” There’s a 640 CUDA core difference between the GTX 1070 and 1080, after all (which, for the record, is (somewhat) equivalent to a GTX 1050, which has 640 total cores). After I wrote our initial look, I thought, “This has to be it [for Pascal]”, but lo and freaking behold…

In the super-quick teaser above, and at the 11 second mark, an undeniable sight can be seen: “TITAN X Collector’s Edition”. Naturally, we must try to guess what in the heck this card is, and why it exists.

The current TITAN Xp has 3840 total CUDA cores, and it seems excruciatingly unlikely the TITAN X(p?) Collector’s Edition is going to have more than that. Both the top-dog Quadros (P6000 and GP100) have 3840 CUDA cores as well, and NVIDIA is unlikely interested in releasing an enthusiast part that’s a lot faster than its much more expensive professional offerings (TITAN Xp is a bit faster in some cases).

Unless this Collector’s Edition leaves out just enough to hide the fact that this is a liquid-cooled card (the green LED could be part of a block…), I’m having a hard time guessing what is going to make this card special. After all, let’s not forget that we’ve already had two TITAN Xs this Pascal generation – where on Earth does a third fit in?

There’s a possibility that NVIDIA will go back to its (Kepler) TITAN roots and deliver a top-end with unlocked double-precision, which is something I’d easily be able to believe if the Quadro P6000 had the same design. But it doesn’t. What about half-precision? What a handsome question!

Throwing caution to the wind, imagine the TITAN Xp Collector’s Edition is in fact an unlocked compute card, in that it offers solid DP and HP. I could believe the FP16 boost more than the FP64, however, so if I could only choose one, it’d be the former, because it’s a metric AMD is currently slaying with its RX Vega GPUs.

If I felt sure about one thing… it’s that this is not going to be Volta-related, because that’d be a little silly immediately following a Pascal-based launch, although it could be argued that a $449 card wouldn’t impact a new $1,200 one too much.

Oy. What do YOU think it is?