Anandtech said:
"I’ll address what’s likely the elephant in the room first, which is the manufacturing process. To date all Pascal GPUs have been fabbed over at TSMC on their 16nm FinFET process. GP107 is not one of those GPUs. Instead, it’s fabbed on a 14nm process – NVIDIA’s specification sheet doesn’t technically state whose process – but by simple elimination it’s a very safe bet that they’re making the chip over at Samsung. Feature size is a red herring here, and instead the significance of this deal is that NVIDIA has not used a fab other than TSMC for GPUs for a long time. In fact we’d have to go back to 2003 to find an NVIDIA GPU fabbed somewhere else, when NVIDIA tapped IBM to help fab the ill-fated NV3x series (GeForce FX).
Suffice it to say, tapping another fab is a very big deal. There’s no second-sourcing here – GP107 is only being made on Samsung’s 14nm process and GP106+ only on TSMC’s 16nm process – but splitting orders like this may just as well be new territory for NVIDIA. As this is just a product announcement NVIDIA hasn’t said anything about the change in fabs, so let your imagination go wild here, but it definitely has some ramifications. I really need to get the GTX 1050 cards in house and on the testbed to figure out the full ramifications of this, but I think the most important change here is that a new process from a new vendor means that the voltage/frequency curve we’ve come to know with TSMC 16nm and Pascal has essentially been thrown out the window.
This in turn may explain the clockspeeds of the GTX 1050 cards. All of the other desktop GeForce 10-series cards have an official boost clock of 1600MHz+, with all but one of those cards being 1700Mhz+. The massive jump in clockspeed relative to Maxwell 2 is one of the signature elements of the Pascal architecture, and a major factor driving the significant performance gains of this generation compared to the last. The GTX 1050 series, by comparison, is only rated to boost up to 1455MHz for the GTX 1050, and lower still for the GTX 1050 Ti at 1392MHz.
Given that
these are power-constrained cards, the final specifications of the cards are bound by a larger number of variables than usual – power curves, attainable frequency range, and now total power consumption –
so I’m not even going to try to insinuate that the lower clockspeeds are solely a function of the change in fabs. However it’s very important to keep in mind that these lower clockspeeds come with a sometimes sizable increase in TDP relative to the GTX 750 series; instead of 55W/60W cards, we have 75W cards. So to use the fully enabled GTX 1050 Ti as an anchor point, power consumption has gone up 15W (25%) for a 28% increase in the boost clock, 1 more SM (20%), and somewhat decoupled from this, the doubled ROP count.
It’s telling then that NVIDIA has informed the press that the
higher TDP cards with an external power connector are going to have much higher boost clocks. Whatever is going on under the hood, power plays a big part, and at a
TDP limit of 75W, GP107 isn’t getting all the room it needs to stretch."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10768/nvidia-announces-geforce-gtx-1050-ti-gtx-1050
And then we have this:
If this leak is true, boost can hit nearly 1.8 GHz for the Ti:
http://i1024.photobucket.com/albums/y303/martmail55/ab5cfb0ed27f47febac712871686179b_zpsxxntwq49.jpg
Die size is 135 mm², 3.3 billion transistors.
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