Nvidia's next-generation GTX 1180 may have been snapped in the wild without its heasink on! While embarrassing for the poor naked card, it does give us an exciting insight into what the upcoming generation of graphics cards might be like.
The nude PCB image comes from Baidu, via VideoCardz and shows a large scale board with options for 8GB or 16GB of memory. Considering we expect Nvidia's 11th generation cards to sport GDDR6 at the top end, 16GB of that would be an astronomical amount of memory bandwidth.
Power wise, the board sports an eight-pin and six-pin connector and a 10-phase VRM section, which together means a much higher power draw than the GTX 1080, which has only a single eight-pin connector. It's possible that the six-pin is optional, but it's an intriguing addition for a mainstream GPU.
The slot from the processor is small, meaning it's probably for the GV104 found in the Tesla V graphics card. There also looks to be an NVLink connector, but that's not for definite. It certainly looks like one. That could mean this isn't a consumer card, but perhaps Nvidia is simply making a board that can do everything as a reference for other cards in the range -- or its a workstation card of some sort.
It appears from the certification numbers that the board design is final though, so this could be the final revision of the Nvidia Founders Edition of whichever card this is.
Image source: Baidu
