As many people still struggle to get their hands on one of Nvidia’s RTX 30-Series graphics cards, preparations for the next generation of GPUs are well underway. The next line of Nvidia graphics, code-named Ada Lovelace, is said to release in 2022.
According to rumors, the new cards may turn out to be twice as fast as the current generation, placing them firmly at the top of any list of the best graphics cards. The dramatic increase in performance comes at a price, though: Nvidia 40-Series graphics cards may also be twice as power-hungry as the current models.
The rumor comes from a well-known leaker on Twitter, @Greymon55, who has a long track record for revealing information about the upcoming releases of both Nvidia and AMD. Previous rumors about the upcoming Nvidia release also come from Greymon55 and Kopite7kimi. Put together, all the leaks are starting to form a fairly clear picture that shows us what to expect from Ada Lovelace GPUs.
According to various rumors, GeForce RTX 40-Series GPUs will run on the new AD102 chip, also referred to as ADA GPU. The new cards may offer a massive step-up in terms of the number of CUDA cores. Rumored to have 18,432 CUDA cores, Ada Lovelace GPUs will have almost twice as many as the current generation of Ampere cards.
According to Kopite7kimi, the new RTX GPUs will run on TSMC’s 5nm process node and might have an astounding clock speed of up to 2.2GHz. There may also be a serious jump in teraflops (TFLOPs). Nvidia’s top card, the RTX 3090, currently has 36 TFLOPs of FP32 compute power. Ada Lovelace cards are rumored to pack up to 81 TFLOPs, which is over twice as much as the RTX 3090.
Some users were wondering whether Nvidia will utilize a multi-chip module (MCM) architecture in Ada Lovelace. Nvidia’s upcoming Hopper GPU, made for data centers and working with AI, is supposed to release fairly soon, and it will feature MCM. However, it’s more likely that Nvidia will not use MCM in Ada Lovelace GPUs and will stick to the traditional design.
Although the cards are almost certain to be massive upgrades to the current generation, the power comes at a certain price. Nvidia’s current RTX 3090 is already a power-hungry card, and the rumored RTX 3090 Ti is said to have a TGP of 450W. This means that Ada Lovelace cards may have a TDP of up to 600W. Such high-power requirements will force the use of the best power supply units available.
No release date for Ada Lovelace GPUs has been confirmed yet, but all signs point to 2022. With the ongoing graphics card shortage, it’s possible that many users won’t get their hands on the new cards right away.
