This also seems to be the motivation behind the already available Titan X with its 12GB of RAM. Some of the gaming hardware reviewers are scratching their heads as to why anyone would need 12GB attached to one die. I chuckled when I saw those reviews that were totally oblivious to the deep learning applications.

The community as a whole is completely oblivious. It's pretty funny to see the youtube reviewers get all worked up over how nvidia and amd are going at it again and such. As if gaming is what's driving this battle. Anyone working in computer science knows the battle is over machine learning, not first person shooters.

Soon headless, socketed solutions will be the preferred form factor for HPC. I image the desktop and server product lines will diverge at that point. It'll be curious to see what will happening to PC gaming at that point.

The gaming hardware junky community is aware, if only as a result of most Titan Black/Z reviews arriving at the conclusion, "a gamer's money is better spent elsewhere, as all a Titan really provides over the latest consumer offerings is good workstation performance (double precision floating point)."

For reference: Titan Z DP FP: 2707 GFLOPS ATI 5870 (released sept 2009): 544 GFLOPS Titan X (current generation - NVidia recognized that gamers don't value DP performance): 192 GFLOPS

I sometimes wonder how it came to be that the Titan Z preceded the Titan X...

E: to clarify, review sites are aware that STEM people need double precision and 6/12GiB GPU memory for something

It's easy to get lost in the noise of the "enthusiast" webring with their semiliterate "benchmarks" and overly paginated "reviews". They punch well above their actual purchasing weight and thus think they're a lot more important then they actually are.

Versus the data scientists and HPC communities that buy hundreds of Nvidia GPUs for CUDA and associated applications.

Well right, but compared to the number of units bought by IT departments, the "enthusiast" market is nothing but decimal dust.

IT departments are not buying Titans and they are not going to be buying Pascals.

IT departments aren't even buying Nvidia at all, they are buying Intel integrated.

That was my point. If all you do is read what passes for news on gamer sites, you might think that the discrete GPU overclocking market was important.

The notion that only the biggest of something is "important" is offensive and wrong.

Sure. I'm a fan of esoteric hardware and software and no big believer in the market success equalling virtue religious ideology, but I'm also not the one invested in the importance of how well this memory stick performs overclocked in Gamer Game IV: Games.

Probably, but remember that if you're maximizing profit then one $100 margin customer is as important as 1000 $0.10 margin customers.

Not to mention margin decreases linearly not as a percentage. So those 1000 $0.10 margin customers can easily turn into -$0.50 margin customers.

The 1000 low-margin customers also come with the added benefit of diversification.

No, you are just totally oblivious to Nvidia's product segments.

The deep learning applications and those that want massive amount of RAM buy Teslas, which have exactly that. Titan X is a gaming card and it's marketed as such.

We do SP GPU development requiring big memories and Titan X features heavily in nVidia's marketing towards us. Tesla is nowhere to be found.