We can confirm that sampling for NVIDIA’s next-gen Ampere lineup will happen in late August, with a potential launch by the end of September. Keep in mind that the actual sampling dates will vary from region to region, depending upon the local logistics but from what we’ve been told, it’ll start by the end of August or early September at the latest, indicating that the hard launch of the RTX 30 series lineup will take place by the end of the third quarter.
NVIDIA’s consumer Ampere lineup, unlike the A100 Accelerator will be based on Samsung’s 8nm process which is essentially a refined variant of the 10nm node. As such, the die size will likely increase and the GPU’s will be less power efficient compared to existing Turing GPUs. NVIDIA is said to be focusing the most on ray-tracing performance which means more hardware dedicated to ray-triangle intersection and BVH (read: more RT cores or something equivalent).
The specs of the higher-end Ampere lineup are as follows (preliminary):
- RTX 3090 (Titan): 5248 shaders|24GB GDDR6X VRAM| 350W TDP
- RTX 3080: 4352 shaders|10GB GDDR6X VRAM| 320W TDP
- RTX 3070 Ti: 3072 shaders|8GB GDDR6X VRAM| 250W TDP
- RTX 3070: 2944 shaders|8GB GDDR6 VRAM|220W TDP
Keep in mind that these are the specs provided by kopite7kimi on Twitter and haven’t been confirmed by our sources nor NVIDIA for that matter, so take them with a grain of salt.
