Rumored specs for Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs leak

As we approach the supposed GDC reveal of the faster and more efficient Ampere-based Nvidia GPUs, rumors continue to grow, but the latest rumors come with some alleged hard specs. Keep that word 'alleged' in mind as you read through these, and sprinkle some salt on with each bite; this is a rumor.

According to purported details leaked out via MyDrivers and KittyCorgi we have what look like the base specs for the next generation of Nvidia cards, presumably to be called the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070.

The leaked specs give us an idea of what to expect, but still leave a bunch of questions. Here's a quick grid breakdown of the alleged specs on these cards:

The data shows the xx80 and xx70 seeing jumps in the numbers of SMs and CUDA Cores as you'd expect from the current 20xx cards. The spec also calls for as much as 20 GB of RAM in the higher-end cards. We expect numbers in the 10-12 GB range, so 20 seems really high. It's more like something we'd expect in a 3080 Ti or Titan RTX 2 (or whatever Nvidia calls their next Titan card).

That's only half the story

We don't know for sure what process the Ampere GPUs will be built on, but we can assume it'll be a 7-nm process since Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that Nvidia will be using TSMC to manufacture its 7nm GPUs, and Samsung for a smaller percentage.

Rumors are also saying that Ampere cards will see a 50% increase in performance over the Turing generation, but will consume half as much power, for a rough performance-per-watt increase of three times. The current rumors also don't talk about the RT cores present on these chips.

We expect a performance improvement on the traditional rasterization side of these cards. The RT cores, though, are the new kid on the block; they're primed for big jumps in performance.

With all of that in mind, these numbers only tell part of the story. KittyCorgi also published some block diagrams, but while the numbers feel fairly intuitive, we're not as sure of the images.

Right now, rumors have Nvidia giving the Ampere generation of RTX cards a big reveal at GDC. They'll then purportedly launch them in the second half of 2020. Pricing, the look of the cards, and exact release dates are, of course, anyone's guess at this point.

Even without verification from Nvidia, a lot of these numbers seem likely for the next generation of cards.

The post Rumored specs for Nvidia's Ampere GPUs leak appeared first on The Tech Report.