Nvidia’s Pascal GPUsare already among the most anticipated upcoming 2016 products from the company, and today's news may very well build that anticipation even more. As it happens today we've learned that the companyalready has four different Pascal graphics cards going through testing and validation work.

It seems the company is putting no time to waste getting it'sGP100 and GP104 Pascal GPUs out the door . The same GPUs that we've spotted on more than one occasion in the past. GP100 is the flagship Pascal GPU and the inevitable successor to Nvidia’s GTX Titan X has beenspotted in transit. Going from TSMC’s fabrication plants to Nvidia’s testing facilities in India. Pascal is the code name for Nvidia’s upcoming GPU architecture scheduled for second half, 2016 market release. The GP100 GPU is the largest and most powerful of Nvidia’s Pascal graphics chips.

Four Nvidia Pascal Graphics Cards Spotted In The Wild

All fourNvidia graphics boardsin question are described as "COMPUTER GRAPHICS CARDS". However, all four carry very similar per unit values and as such we could be looking only at thecircuitboards andnot necessarily graphics cards but there's really no way of tellingfor sure.

All four boards start with the same 699 serial numberand the earliest record of a board carrying that serial numberappears in December. Soweknow that we're looking at Nvidia graphics boards that are new and did not exist at any point before December. This could potentially explain Pascal's absence from CES and why Nvidia choseto showcase the Pascal Drive PX2 module with Maxwell GPUs instead.

There are four different boards here with the following serial numbers :

699-2H403-0201-500

699-1G411-0000-000

699-1H400-0000-100

699-12914-0071-100

The 1H400, 1G411 and 2H403 units are all derivatives/variants of the same basic board , while the 12914 board is distinctly different.So what we have here looks very much like threeevolutionary iterations with the first three boards. This is especially likely because there's no overlapping between the three. One board shows up and it's followed by another with no recurrence of the previous board.

There's no way of knowing for certain whether these are GP100 or GP104 boards as of yet.Interestingly GP100 or “Big Pascal” as we’d like to call it has been spotted a few months back. Back then Nvidia only had GPUs but there was no evidence of any actual boards. So looks like Pascal has come a long waysince then.

What we know so far about Nvidia's flagship Pascal GP100GPU :

Pascal graphicsarchitecture.2x performance per watt estimated improvement overMaxwell.To launch in 2016, purportedly the second half of the year.DirectX 12 feature level 12_1or higher.Successor to the GM200 GPU found in the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti.Built on the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process from TSMC.Allegedly has a total of 17 billion transistors, more than twice that of GM200.Will feature four 4-Hi HBM2 stacks, for a total of 16GB of VRAMand 8-Hi stacks for up to 32GB for the professional compute SKUs.Features a 4096-bit memory businterface, same as AMD's Fiji GPU power the Fury series.Features NVLink (only compatible withnext generation IBM PowerPC server processors)Supports half precisionFP16 compute at twice the rate of full precision FP32.