Even if it really is double the performance of the RTX 2080, that's still only a 35% improvement in performance per watt. It has a 320W TDP, which is nearly 50% more than the 215W TDP of the RTX 2080. That sounds impressive, but that appears to be more of a theoretical performance uplift rather than what we'll see on the initial slate of GPUs. At one point in his presentation, Jensen said that Ampere delivers 1.9X the performance per watt as Turing. Let's also tackle the efficiency question quickly. Does the Ampere architecture justify the pricing? We'll have to wait a bit longer to actually test the hardware ourselves, but the specs at least look extremely promising. The RTX 3080 meanwhile costs $699, and the RTX 3070 will launch at $499, keeping the same pricing as the previous generation RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2070 Super. The GeForce RTX 3090 is set to debut at $1,499, which is a record for a single-GPU GeForce card, effectively replacing the Titan family. Thankfully, depending on how you want to compare pricing, pricing isn't going to be significantly worse than the previous generation GPUs. And if those workloads include ray tracing and/or DLSS, the gulf might be even wider. Combined with the architectural updates, which we'll get to in a moment, Nvidia says the RTX 3080 has double the performance of the RTX 2080. It's the largest single generation jump in performance I can recall seeing from Nvidia. What does that mean to the end users? Besides potentially requiring a power supply upgrade, and the use of a 12-pin power connector on Nvidia's own models, it means a metric truckload of performance. The RTX 3090 comes with an all-time high TDP for a single GPU of 350W (that doesn't count the A100, obviously), while the RTX 3080 has a 320W TDP. GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was a 250/260W part, and the Titan RTX was a 280W part. The V100 was a 300W part for the data center model, and the new Nvidia A100 pushes that to 400W. Nvidia is taking the middle route and offering even more performance at still higher power levels. While 7nm/8nm does allow for better efficiency at the same performance, it also allows for much higher performance at the same power. The consumer GPUs also increase in transistor counts while greatly reducing die sizes. That's a massive 156% increase in transistor count from the GV100, while the die size is only 1.3% larger. GA100 for example has 54 billion transistors and an 826mm square die size. Instead, Nvidia is taking all the extra transistors and efficiency and simply offering more, at least at the top of the product stack. With the shift from TSMC's 12nm FinFET node to TSMC N7 and Samsung 8N, many expected Ampere to deliver better performance at lower power levels. Of course, third party designs are free to deviate from Nvidia's designs. As an Nvidia video notes, "Whenever we talk about GPU performance, it all comes from the more power you can give and can dissipate, the more performance you can get." A reworked cooling solution, fans, and PCB (printed circuit board) are all part of improving the overall performance story of Nvidia's Ampere GPUs. Besides the underlying GPU architecture, Nvidia has revamped the core graphics card design, with a heavy focus on cooling and power.
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