If you thought that the GeForce RTX 3080/3090 were power hogs, then you haven’t seen nothing yet. According to a couple of reputed leakers on Twitter (@kopite7kimi/@Greymon55), the Lovelace-based RTX 4080/4090 will draw as much as 500W of power under load. You may have already read our earlier report that the next-gen RTX graphics cards will be fabbed on TSMC’s 5nm-class process node, and might be a bit confused as to how this can be.
Well, quite frankly, it makes perfect sense. From what we’ve heard, Lovelace should easily offer twice as much performance as the contemporary Ampere parts, with an FP32 core count of up to 18,432. The AD102 flagship is expected to feature a total SM count of 144 distributed across 12 GPCs. That’s a 71% gain in raw compute performance over the GA102. Even if TSMC’s N5 node is 30% more power-efficient than Samsung’s 8nm LPP node, we’re looking at a sheer increase of around 80% in shader count. That should easily result in a power draw at least 30-50% more than the top-end (RTX 3080/3090) Ampere offerings.
NVIDIA’s Hopper Data Center graphics cards are said to be based on an MCM design. According to @kopit7kimi, every GPC (Graphics Processing Cluster) in the GH100 will consist of three CPCs which in turn will feature three TPCs (Texture Processing Cluster), further sub-divided into two SMs. It’s worth noting that we are expecting a separate architecture for the gaming and data center markets, with Ada Lovelace coming to the former as a monolithic design and Hopper with its MCM design headed to the next-gen Tensor core accelerators.
