A new round of rumors has dredged up juicy details about the specifications of NVIDIA’s next-gen GeForce RTX 50 “Blackwell” flagship. According to @kopite7kimi, the GB202 gaming die will have a 12×8 configuration, while the data center “GB100” will likely have an 8×10 structure. This implies that the GB202-powered RTX 5090/5090 Ti will consist of 12 GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters), each with 8 TPCs (Texture Processing Clusters). A TPC, in turn, comprises 2 SMs (Streaming Multi-Processors) each of which contains 128 FP32 cores (and half as many INT32 cores).
The above numbers net a core count of 24,576 for the fully enabled GB202 die (spread across 192 SMs and 96 TPCs). Like its predecessor, the GeForce RTX 5090 should contain a few disabled SMs to ensure proper yields. Optimistically, we can expect a core count of 24,046 or 188 SMs (4 disabled). If NVIDIA decides to be greedy, then like the RTX 4090, the RTX 5090 may come with a whole GPC disabled. In other words, up to 22,528 cores across 176 SMs.
The memory bus of the GeForce RTX 5090/5090 Ti leaked out quite a while back. As per Kimi, the fastest Blackwell gaming GPU will come with an unprecedented 512-bit bus, while the GB100 will leverage an 8192-bit bus for complex neural network workloads. The former will likely be paired with 32GB of either GDDR6X or GDDR7 memory. Considering that the first wave of GDDR7 chips is faster and more power efficient than the latest GDDR6X offerings, it may get the nod.
Regardless, the GeForce RTX 5090, with a 512-bit bus and 24Gbps memory, will result in a massive bandwidth uplift of over 1.5 TB/s or 50% more than the RTX 4090. A tidbit regarding the ROPs/RB (Render Output Units/Raster Backend) has also surfaced. If the GB202 (RTX 5090/5090 Ti) is derived from the GH202, it will contain twice as many ROPs as each GPC would have an additional TPC and ROP cluster. We might even see 4x ROPs than Ada, but that’s unlikely.
We’re still at least 12-14 months away from the official release of the GeForce RTX 5090 and its Blackwell brethren, so be sure to take these rumors with reasonable doubt.
