Pascal delayed?

The fairly sudden Blade 16 release is leading me to think that the Pascal GPUs may have been delayed significantly enough for Razer to bite the bullet and release the new Blades with the 970M.
Thoughts?

There is also the possibility that Razer has opted to make the Blade Pro more 'Pro' by including Pascal GPUs later, but that seems unlikely.

 

Perhaps, we may know more at the GPU conference but I really think Pascal won't be available (in mobile form) until 3/4Q 16.

The 14nm finFET tech has been a struggle, I just don't see TSMC making sufficient quantities until then.

 

Hmmmm same 970M. I wonder if they're planning to do a 'tick' style refresh for the Blade 14 when Pascal does finally come around. I think if they give it to the Pro, the 14 will get it sooner or later.

 

970 is plenty enough for me. There is always the Core option if I want to upgrade.

 

Not a good time to be spending money on a 970 device when a new gen card /laptops are just around the corner and won't be priced too much higher. What they typically do is lower the price of the older gen and the newer gen will take over its position tier wise and have similar pricing.

 

pascal wont be here till q3/q4. Blade refresh will happen at CES 2017 and feature pascal.

 

Just around the corner? We are probably 6 months away from Pascal, at that point it will be 2017 before those cards are in Razer Blades...

 

I'm totally agree with you.

NVIDIA is likely to announce their Pascal flagship next month, and then I think you will need to wait like 4-5 more months at least for them to release the mobile version, and then Razer need like at least 1-2 more months to finalize the Blade before release it. So totally it's going to be next year if you want to wait for Pascal.

 

On another note, does anyone believe with the Pascal, triple 4K monitor setups will actually work?

 

I don't see why not...

 

Well 4 Titan X Cards couldn't power three 4k monitors fully.

 

Oh dang! That's my bad too, didn't see you were asking about THREE 4k monitors...

 

Mobile cards are normally available before the flagship cards since they are easier to manufacture, I am actually only interested in the Blade Pro so there is hope yet.

 

Pascal is rumored to have a GTX 1080 card launching this May. In addition in April Nvidia is going to have a keynote at GTC.

There are some people saying Q3 however, I don't think it will take that long. Plus Nvidia has been asking a lot of tech/gaming YouTubers to come to GTC. This indicates that something big is coming and that they wan't a lot of people there.

Its all up in the air at the moment but considering the GTX 970 is 2 years old I hope they do a refresh of the blade.

 

I think a lot of us are quite surprised that Razer went with the 970m.

 

I can agree because its time to move on to pascal.

 

I don't think the extra 3GB of memory will actually better performance at all, it isn't like it is running in SLI. it only seems like an upgrade on paper so they didn't have to say we put the same GPU from 2014 into the Blade again.

 

I was a little surprised myself, but then thinking about it it made more sense. Even if desktop Pascal cards start to trickle down in May/June, mobile GPUs are rarely first products out of the pipeline. I don't think we will see full lineups until Q4 of this year. Laptops require testing and integration, they need product samples to design and redesign everything before setting up manufacturing and then taking delivery of the necessary chips and creating a product. I suspect the earliest a pascal GPU will show up in a laptop will be mid to late Q3. On top of that, Razer isn't exactly high volume, it wouldn't surprise me if they don't get the same samples and guaranteed shipping dates on parts as other manufacturers.

Release a nice upgrade now and deal with the problem of doing an upgrade in 6-9 months or making people sweat it and put out something for CES 2017 with availability in late Jan 2017, but release something new now 100% to take advantage of the new Skylake chipsets with Thunderbolt 3 and USB C. Don't make people wait 6-9 months for features available on the Ultrabook while your high end laptop is stuck in 2015.

 

Skylake and Maxwell is stuck in 2015.

 

That was a typo, was supposed to be 2014 which was when the last Blade was released