Nvidia just launched a new, top-end GPU to replace the six-month old Titan X. The new Titan Xp is faster, bigger, and meaner than its predecessor.<\/b>
When Nvidia launched the GTX 1080 Ti at the end of February, it short-circuited its own highest-end product, the 6-month old Nvidia Titan X, thanks to higher clocks and a much lower price tag ($700, compared with $1,200). Now, Nvidia is rectifying that issue with a full-fat GP102 part \u2014 the Titan Xp.
The Titan Xp sports 3840 cores, 240 texture units, and 96 ROPS, compared with the 1080 Ti\u2019s 3584:224:88 configuration. We don\u2019t know the card\u2019s base clock yet, but Nvidia\u2019s press release claims 3840 CUDA cores running at 1.6GHz. It\u2019s not clear if that refers to the base clock \u2014 if so, the Titan Xp would be clocked significantly higher than any other GP102 on the market today. We know it packs an eye-popping 547GB\/s of memory bandwidth and a 12GB frame buffer.
The purpose of a card like this is simple: At $1,200, it isn\u2019t meant to represent a particularly great deal; it\u2019s meant to serve as a halo product for those particularly discerning and well-heeled customers who want something just a little faster, a little nicer, than everything else on the market. Even the 1080 Ti is going to be a better deal than the Titan Xp, as far as price\/performance ratios are concerned.
The other interesting tidbit to come out of this announcement is that Nvidia is promising a new driver set, due later this month, that will add full Mac support for the entire Pascal product lines. Anyone with a 10-series Nvidia GPU should be able to use that GPU in their Mac, no problem\u2026 provided, of course, that you have a relatively old Mac Pro.
There\u2019s a certain level of absurdity to the current situation. Unless you buy an external dock and create a custom solution for yourself via Thunderbolt, you\u2019re not plugging a 10-class GPU into a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or MacBook. iMac? No way. Mac mini? The GPU is larger than the system. And we already covered the limitations of the current Mac Pro, and why Apple has to redesign its own \u201cgroundbreaking\u201d chassis to allow it to work with modern hardware.
It isn\u2019t clear if these drivers are limited to Mac Pros that support macOS Sierra (10.12) or not. Only the mid-2010 and mid-2012 Mac Pros were updated officially for Sierra, though apparently Xeon workstations from 2008 and 2009 can be unofficially upgraded to Sierra (at which point, presumably, the 10-series GPU would still work with them).
Nvidia could also be hinting that it expects to take AMD\u2019s slice of the Apple market when Apple refreshes the Mac Pro. Apple has relied on AMD GPU silicon for a number of years, but that could change if Team Green offered them a sweet enough deal.<\/p>\n