China-based Jingjia Micro has taped out its next-generation JM9 graphics processing units. The new GPUs will reportedly offer performance comparable to that of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10-series 'Pascal' GPUs launched in 2016. The new GPUs will hit the market sometime next year.
Jingjia Micro's JM9 family consists of two GPUs: the entry-level JM9231 featuring a 2 FP32 TFLOPS performance at 150W and the higher-end JM9271 that offers FP32 performance of around 8 TFLOPS at 200W. Graphics cards based on the JM9231 will be equipped with 8GB of GDDR5 memory, whereas boards featuring the JM9271 will come with 16GB of HBM memory.
The GPU developer from China has been talking about its JM9 GPU family since at least 2019, so the family is clearly late to the market, as the company taped out the chips only recently, according to a report from MyDrivers (via VideoCardz). Typically, it takes a year for GPUs to enter mass production after the initial tape out if the chip works as planned, so don't expect JM9-based graphics cards to hit the market before fall 2022.
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | JM9231 | GTX 1050 | JM9271 | GTX 1080 |
| API Support | OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 1.2 | OpenGL 4.6, DX12 | OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.0 | OpenGL 4.6, DX12 |
| Boost Clock Rate | > 1,500 MHz | 1,455 MHz | > 1,800 MHz | 1,733 MHz |
| Bus Interface | PCIe 3.0 | PCIe 3.0 | PCIe 4.0 | PCIe 3.0 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 256 GB/s | 112 GB/s | 512 GB/s | 320 GB/s |
| Memory Capacity | 8GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 | 16GB HBM | 8GB GDDR5X |
| Pixel Rate | > 32 GPixel/s | 46.56 GPixel/s | > 128 GPixel/s | 110.9 GPixel/s |
| FP32 (Float) Performance | 2 TFLOPs | 1.862 TFLOPs | 8 TFLOPs | 8.873 TFLOPs |
| Outputs | HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.3 | HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4 | HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.3 | HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4 |
| Encoding | H.265/4K 60FPS | H.265/4K 60FPS | H.265/4K 60FPS | H.265/4K 60FPS |
| TDP | 150W | 75W | 200W | 180W |
Offering performance of Nvidia's 2016 GPUs in 2022 will hardly make Jingjia Micro a leading supplier of GPUs, but the company works with the Chinese government and supplies graphics chips for applications like military aircraft (and probably their simulators), so expect Jingjia Micro to sell quite a lot of its GPUs to its traditional customers that supply PCs to various government-controlled organizations.
It remains to be seen whether the company will also sell its JM9271 to gamers, though. The chip uses HBM memory and boasts a 512GBps memory bandwidth, which is higher than that featured by Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080. At the same time, use of HBM memory makes the JM9271 more expensive than most contemporary gaming GPUs, so its success against offerings from AMD and Nvidia is not guaranteed.
