Shots of NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 PCB (or perhaps the 3080) have surfaced on the Bilibili forums (now taken down), showing an interesting design. The VRAM dies are on the back-side of the PCB along with a second processor (co-processor?). Furthermore, the NVLink connector is different from the one on the Turing GPUs.
Another aspect worth noting is the power requirement. There are three 8-pin power connectors which means we may very well see a power draw exceeding 300W. There are eleven memory stacks surrounding the supposed co-processor on the back, all closely packed together.
This means that we’re likely looking at the RTX 3080 with 10 or 11GB of GDDR6/6X memory, but it’s hard to be sure as we only have a view of the back-side. Either way, the major concern here is with respect to the thermals.
Update: The 12th memory chip has been spotted. We’ll likely get 12 on the back, 12 on the front, resulting in an overall 24GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21Gbps:
At this point, it’s almost a certainty that the Ampere consumer cards will be fabbed on Samsung’s 8nm process which in reality is just an optimized version of the foundry’s 10nm node. When you pack 5,000+ cores on a 10nm die with a power draw exceeding 300W, you got a GPU that will be really hard to cool.
Furthermore, those closely packed memory dies will also get pretty hot under loads, so you’ll need proper cooling for them too. Then again, I’m not too sure if this is leak is legit or not. Gonna have to wait and see.
