Nvidia’s Mobility Flagship Might Be Called the (Mobile) Geforce GTX 980 – Features Full Blown GM204 Core with 2048 CUDA Cores

Nvidia is getting ready to roll out the last card in its 900 series mobility lineup and its none other than the full blown GM204 die. The flagship GPU originally codenamed “N16E-GXX” was recently confirmed to feature 2048 cores and high clock rates, something we had already previously explored in the original leak. A new report by Sweclockers suggests that the card might not be called GTX 990M after all, rather the GTX 980 – yes, that is identical to the desktop counterpart. Oh and take a good look at the rumor tag on top, it’s there for a reason.

Not an official Nvidia logo. One probable name of the GM204 mobility chip @WCCFTech @Nvidia 

GM204 mobility flagship could be called the Mobile GTX 980

The existence of the card was originally revealed by Wu Haijun, CEO of a Chinese laptop manufacturer, who stated that Nvidia is planning to reveal ‘a Geforce GTX 990M mobility graphic card’ sometime in the September to December time-frame ( or Q4 2015 in other words). The CEO further revealed that the TDP of the chip is going to be upwards of 100 Watts (and could be as high as 180 Watts). Now it was originally thought that the card would be called the GTX 990M. This seemed to make sense since Nvidia already has a card in the GTX 980M slot. However, new information suggests the card is actually called the Mobile GTX 980. So while this seems to be an unusual decision – it’s not one completely unprecedented. Nvidia previously has had mobility nomenclature occupied with multiple GPUs. The current GTX 980M (notice the ‘M’ suffix at the end and the lack thereof in the proposed naming scheme) chips are based on a crippled GM204 die with 1536 CUDA cores (4 out of the 16 SMMs disabled).

Since the GPU is apparently soldered to the board this would mean we would not be seeing any MXM based variants and the brand new GTX 980M graphic card will only be present in select luggables and laptops that have been designed from the ground up to support it. While the timeframe given is the fourth quarter of 2015, we could expect the chip to land as early as September (considering it has already started popping up in driver updates).

The Mobile GTX 980 comes with 2048 CUDA cores, 128 texture mapping units and 64 raster operation units. The 980M featured 1536 CUDA cores, 96 texture mapping units and 64 raster operation units. It was clocked at 1038 MHz while the Mobile GTX 980 will have a higher clock speed of 1190 MHz. The desktop class, GeForce GTX 980 is clocked at 1126 MHz base and 1218 MHz boost.

The notebooks that house the GPU codenamed ‘N16E-GXX’ (aka the mobility GTX 980) will have to have some pretty impressive cooling solutions and robust power supply to power this beast. The soldered-to-motherboard design should help ensure a constant stream of juice and should make designing native cooling solutions relatively easily. A chip like this will easily smoke most single card desktop setups (it is thought to be equivalent to a current GTX 970M SLI or a desktop GTX 970) and should help Nvidia deliver on their promise of desktop class gaming in laptops.

For the sake of clarity, we won’t be update the chart with till this nomenclature is confirmed:

WCCFTech
Model	GTX 990M	GTX 980M	GTX 970M	GTX 965M	GTX 960M
Architecture	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell
GPU	GM204	GM204	GM204	GM204	GM107
CUDA cores	2048	1536	1280	1024	640
Texture Units	128	96	80	64	40
Raster Devices	64	64	48	32	16
Clock Speed	1190 MHz	1038 MHz	924 MHz	950 MHz	1097 MHz
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Amount of memory	8 GB GDDR5	8/4 GB GDDR5	3/6 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5
Memory Frequency	5000 MHz	5000 MHz	5000 MHz	5000 MHz	5000 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	160 GB / s	160 GB / s	120 GB / s	80 GB/s	80 GB/s