Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...-on-camera

Twitter user @GarnetSunset has shared two photographs of one of Nvidia's looming Ampere graphics cards. The markings on the backplate are barely visible, but the mysterious graphics card appears to be the GeForce RTX 3090.

It's not the first time that we've seen the peculiar design, but the graphics card is simply massive when compared to the GeForce RTX 2080. According to the images, the GeForce RTX 3090 occupies up to three PCI slots as evidenced by the I/O bracket. It remains to be seen whether aftermarket models will follow suit though. If so, we can see graphic cards with included AIO liquid cooler getting more popular or enthusiasts simply slapping a waterblock on the graphics card and roll with a full liquid cooling system.

The triple-slot design certainly raises the question to whether Ampere will pull a lot of power and, thus, if that's why it has such a beefy heatsink. Early rumors were already floating around that the flagship Ampere graphics card could debut with a 350W TDP (thermal design power). Then the subject of the new 12-pin PCIe power connector emerged and added more fuel to the fire.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...e-a100-gpu

Microsoft is deploying Nvidia’s new A100 Ampere GPUs across its data centers, and giving customers a massive AI processing boost in the process. Get it? In the– (a sharply hooked cane enters, stage right)

Ahem. As I was saying. The ND A100 v4 VM family starts with a single VM and eight A100 GPUs, but it can scale up to thousands of GPUs with 1.6Tb/s of bandwidth per VM. The GPUs are connected with a 200GB/s InfiniBand link, and Microsoft claims to offer dedicated GPU bandwidth 16x higher than the next cloud competitor. The reason for the emphasis on bandwidth is that the total available bandwidth often constrains AI model size and complexity.