Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://techreport.com/news/3471044/nvid...090-leaks/

Despite how long this year has felt, summer is nearly here and fall is quickly approaching. That means that the wave of hardware coming this fall is going into production so that we can all dump our wallets out into the coffers of AMD, Nvidia, and the console makers. And once physical elements of hardware are under production, that means leaks. We’ve seen a few leaks in the past couple days purporting to be a GeForce “Ampere” RTX 3080 Founders’ Edition and while every rumor should be taken with enough salt to give you heartburn, these are starting to look credible.

The leaked photographs show a heatsink with a complex design that has fans on opposite sides of the shroud, presumably with one fan for intake and one for output.

Igor Wassolek of Igor’s Lab says the pictures are most likely accurate; his sources tell him that an internal investigation has been launched within Nvidia to the source of the leaked cooler shots, and adds that Nvidia may change the designs as a result of the leak. The shroud as it currently exists reportedly costs $150 to build, suggesting that these cards are going to be expensive. These Founders’ Edition cards reportedly use a custom PCB that supports this dual-sided cooler, and Igor says this PCB will be different from the one going out to vendors like Gigabyte, EVGA, and Asus.

Nvidia is apparently looking to mix things up this time, too. Igor says there will be three Founders’ Edition cards at launch: a 3080, a 3080 Ti, and a 3090 Ti. All three cards will reportedly use the GA102 GPU, which is a change from the 20-series cards, which each used a different GPU.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/3115...gb-of-vram

The framing of these GPUs makes me wonder if Nvidia is launching its absolute top-end market stack first. With Pascal, Nvidia led with the GTX 1080 and 1070, with the 1080 Ti debuting months later. For Turing, Nvidia launched the RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 simultaneously, but used a different GPU for each. This positioning sounds like Nvidia will lead with what we’d have typically called a “Titan / xx80 Ti / xx80” positioning as opposed to “xx80 Ti / xx80, xx70.”

The RAM loadout is also interesting. With consoles now packing 16GB of unified RAM and some high-end GPUs like the Radeon VII already featuring 16GB, I think there’s been a certain amount of assumption that 16GB would be the RAM capacity of choice next generation. This data suggests otherwise. The 24GB of VRAM on the 3090 Ti/Super is a nod to the card’s datacenter/workstation roots, not an attempt to move the market towards higher VRAM loadouts.
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If the TDPs are to be believed, Nvidia is also finally leaving the 250W TDP point behind at the high end. Both Nvidia and AMD have flirted with higher-power GPUs before, but 250W has been an anchor point for GPUs in much the same way that 125W TDPs were an anchor for consumer CPUs for many years. Intel and AMD have both exceeded that mark in recent years, and if these rumors are accurate, we should expect GPUs to do so as well. This would free AMD to essentially pursue the same path.

An increased TDP isn’t necessarily surprising. Nvidia may have chosen to maximize performance at the top end, gambling that high-end gamers who would consider these cards in the first place have systems powerful enough to handle them. If you have an 850W – 1.2kW PSU and adequate cooling, a 250W CPU and 350W GPU won’t be anything you can’t handle in the first place.

No word on pricing, but the one thing you can bet these cards won’t be is cheap. Nvidia may position them competitively relative to where Turing or Pascal debuted if it feels AMD is a threat or if it’s worried about the impact of coronavirus on GPU sales, but I’d expect the company to hold the line on pricing to the greatest degree possible.