Ready your PC and especially the PSUs because NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 40 'Ada Lovelace' GPUs are rumored to consume almost a kilowatt of power.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 'Ada Lovelace' GPUs Rumored For September Launch, Flagship AD102 Chip Could Consume Over 800 Watts of Power
There have been multiple reports that NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 40 GPUs based on the Ada Lovelace graphics architecture are going to be insanely fast and insanely power hungry. Now the latest rumors coming from Kopite7kimi and Greymon55 seem to point out that the flagship GPU, the AD102, could consume over 800 Watts of power.
According to the latest information, Greymon55 mentions that GeForce RTX 40 'Ada Lovelace' GPUs could be available as early as September 2022. But the launch isn't the most interesting part that is mentioned in the rumor but the alleged power figures. Both leakers state that the flagship AD102 GPU will have multiple SKUs for the RTX 4080, RTX 4080 Ti, and RTX 4090 desktop graphics cards. It looks like these GPUs will also feature different power targets with the entry-level GPU hitting 450 Watts of peak consumption, followed by the Ti variant at around 600W while the flagship RTX 4090 could end up with a monstrous TDP of around 850W.
That's just a rumor.
I've heard 450/600/800W for 80/80Ti/90 before.
But everything is not confirmed.— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) February 23, 2022
I am not clear at the moment whether one model has three TGP ranges or whether it has three models but the TGP number of the AD102 is 450W-650W-850W, of course this is not the final specification and there may be some deviation.
— Greymon55 (@greymon55) February 23, 2022
Both leakers do state that these aren't based on the final specifications and the power figures could change in the retail variants but there's a good reason to believe why these could end up being true. NVIDIA is already investing development around the new PCIe Gen 5 connector that offers up to 600W power input per connector. The delayed GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is one example where the card is expected to rock at a TGP of 450W and will be the first desktop graphics card to utilize such a connector interface. The next-gen cards are also expected to utilize the same PCIe standard but it looks like the top variant could end up with two Gen 5 connectors to supplement the ~800W power requirement.
Several PSU makers have already started releasing their brand new Gen 5 power supplies which would include the necessary connectors to support the next-gen GPUs but they only feature one primary Gen 5 connector which means that if NVIDIA was to use a second 16-pin port, users will have to use a 2x 8-pin to 1x 16-pin adapter which will ship with most of these PSUs.
Of course, these are all rumors for now but both leakers have very high credibility based on their previous rumors and leaks so this might end up being true. Considering that NVIDIA is aiming for a huge 2x performance gain with their Ada Lovelace GeForce RTX 40 series lineup to compete against AMD's RDNA 3 offerings, the green team could be going all out and that includes power and pricing, besides just performance.
Previously rumored specs have shown us a huge update to the core specs. The NVIDIA AD102 "ADA GPU" appears to have 18432 CUDA Cores based on the preliminary specs (which can change) provided by Kopite. This is almost twice the cores present in Ampere which was already a massive step up from Turing. A 2.2 GHz clock speed would give us 81 TFLOPs of compute performance (FP32). This is more than twice the performance of the existing RTX 3090 which packs 36 TFLOPs of FP32 compute power.
NVIDIA / AMD Next-Gen Rumored GPU Performance Estimates
Kopite7kimi also hinted at some specification details of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace chips a while back which you can read more about here and check out the specs in the table provided below:
NVIDIA CUDA GPU (RUMORED) Preliminary:
| GPU | TU102 | GA102 | AD102 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flagship SKU | RTX 2080 Ti | RTX 3090 Ti | RTX 4090? |
| Architecture | Turing | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| Process | TSMC 12nm NFF | Samsung 8nm | TSMC 4N? |
| Die Size | 754mm2 | 628mm2 | ~600mm2 |
| Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC) | 6 | 7 | 12 |
| Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) | 36 | 42 | 72 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) | 72 | 84 | 144 |
| CUDA Cores | 4608 | 10752 | 18432 |
| L2 Cache | 6 MB | 6 MB | 96 MB |
| Theoretical TFLOPs | 16 TFLOPs | 40 TFLOPs | ~90 TFLOPs? |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6X | GDDR6X |
| Memory Capacity | 11 GB (2080 Ti) | 24 GB (3090 Ti) | 24 GB (4090?) |
| Memory Speed | 14 Gbps | 21 Gbps | 24 Gbps? |
| Memory Bandwidth | 616 GB/s | 1.008 GB/s | 1152 GB/s? |
| Memory Bus | 384-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit |
| PCIe Interface | PCIe Gen 3.0 | PCIe Gen 4.0 | PCIe Gen 4.0 |
| TGP | 250W | 350W | 600W? |
| Release | Sep. 2018 | Sept. 20 | 2H 2022 (TBC) |
The NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU family is expected to bring a generational jump similar to Maxwell to Pascal. It is expected to launch in the second half of 2022 but expect supply and pricing to be similar to current cards despite NVIDIA spending billions of dollars to accquire those good good TSMC 5nm wafers.
News Source: Videocardz
