Monday, May 2nd 2022
NVIDIA AD102 and AMD Navi 31 in a Race to Reach 100 TFLOPs FP32 First
A technological race is brewing between NVIDIA and AMD over which brand's GPU reaches the 100 TFLOP/s peak FP32 throughput mark first. AMD's TeraScale graphics architecture and the "RV770" silicon, were the first to hit the 1 TFLOP/s mark, way back in 2008. It would take 14 years for this figure to reach 100 TFLOP/s for flagship GPUs. NVIDIA's next generation big GPU based on the "Ada Lovelace," the AD102, is the green team's contender for the 100 TFLOP/s mark, according to kopite7kimi. To achieve this, all 144 streaming multiprocessors (SM) or 18,432 CUDA cores, of the AD102 will have to be enabled.
From the red team, the biggest GPU based on the next-generation RDNA3 graphics architecture, "Navi 31," could offer peak FP32 throughput of 92 TFLOP/s according to greymon55, which gives AMD the freedom to create special SKUs running at high engine clocks, just to reach the 100 TFLOP/s mark. The Navi 31 silicon is expected to triple the compute unit count over its predecessor, resulting in 15,360 stream processors. Both the AD102 and Navi 31 are expected to be built on the same TSMC N5 (5 nm EUV) node, and product launches for both are expected by year-end.
Sources:
kopite7kimi (Twitter), greymon55 (Twitter), VideoCardz 1, VideoCardz 2
From the red team, the biggest GPU based on the next-generation RDNA3 graphics architecture, "Navi 31," could offer peak FP32 throughput of 92 TFLOP/s according to greymon55, which gives AMD the freedom to create special SKUs running at high engine clocks, just to reach the 100 TFLOP/s mark. The Navi 31 silicon is expected to triple the compute unit count over its predecessor, resulting in 15,360 stream processors. Both the AD102 and Navi 31 are expected to be built on the same TSMC N5 (5 nm EUV) node, and product launches for both are expected by year-end.
25 Comments on NVIDIA AD102 and AMD Navi 31 in a Race to Reach 100 TFLOPs FP32 First
i think it be more amazing if this is achieved with power efficiency in mind but we will see
So where do we place our bets?
Fun headlines though, and having the outright fastest card helps your brand sell more cards from the top to bottom of your line-up.
Smaller development cycles, crazily increase tdp, insane coolers, 5 slot cards this time?!, insane prices. How about take some time and refine them to be actually pratical, especially now whem power consumption is more expensive and deadly for the planet.
...and then Intel gone over 1GHz and had to recall the chip because it wasn't stable. And hearing about Nvidia GPUs needing so much energy, I wonder if Nvidia could do the same mistake. But probably they also remember the 1.13GHz Pentium III story.
[I]"NVIDIA AD102 and AMD Navi 31 in a Race to Reach 100 TFLOPs FP32 First"[/I]
Lost in Translation: NVIDIA AD102 and AMD Navi 31 in a Race to Reach +$3,000 Consumer dGPU First.I dont mind there are ultra high end GPU for the one that want to buy them. I don't it's not such a big deal that people make it sound like. Indeed, if your goal is to buy the best of the best and it's 3000$ instead of 500$, it make your life harder, but having the best of the best might not be the best thing except for your own ego.
The key thing is at 300-500$, can i buy something that have way better performance per dollars? that wasn't the case recently. I hope it will be the case for ADA/Navi 3x. Having cheaper cards that increase the performance level will increase the average performance of PC and the baseline of devs building game into.
If a 7600 cards have the perf of a 6800, i think that will be great, if it have just above 6600 xt. that will suck. Indeed i mean if the price stay in the same ballpark.
There will be always people that will spend too much on things. MMO have their whales, PC market have them too. Same with cars, audio etc. AMD and Nvidia are just deserving a niche.
What next? 5000 series with record breaking performance for a mere 1200W and card fills entire case for cooler.
5Kw dedicated circuit 2 phase.
I remember being able to buy better contact coolers for the GPU die itself and or changing fans to get a few more Mhz and the IDE Molex connectors and making sure they were clean so the power was as stable as could be. Gluing heatsinks on the memory chips and VRM's. Now there is no possible way it would survive without advanced cooling of all components in stock trim.
So what you have is Nvidia going one big monolithic with advantage latency and downside power consumption, and AMD going MCM or simply put smaller chips put together working as one. The advantage here is quite lower costs, power and some downsides such as latency as you see with a traditional Ryzen CPU and communication from CCD to CCD or so.
These chips are proberly designed with 4K native gaming at 144Hz or something in mind; and in the compute space they proberly need even more larger numbers. They just setting the bar at this point. And future releases will be obviously more optimized. No chips dont require 600W or 900W when gaming at simply a locked refreshrate.
There will be cut down versions as well; proberly within the 75 up to 375W range. So far on paper AMD still looks like the more efficient chipmaker right now.
Still with Lovelace tipped to hit 900W in 4090 (Ti) form, this insane power growth can't be sustained. I'm hoping the true all new architectures after Lovelace are less about brute forcing the performance than increasing via other means.
If it ever did get made, my bet would be on that test effectively being two 4090 24GB type products connected on one PCB or something equally crazy, rather than simply flowing 900w through a chip likely designed around 300-450w and releasing it.
Who else rememmbers this?
The power consumption. Not something unique in performance, but just the power consumption. I vaguely remember a slew of similar GPUs and none of them were real winners, but damn sure were real power guzzlers. Strangely those 'top' SKUs are also plagued with problems... because where there is high TDP... there is heat.
Efficiency is king. Everything else is BS. Nvidia knew this the past ten years and their best SKUs had a golden ratio of power/perf - throughout the stack, as well, not just for the top part. Strange how they suddenly forgot when they missed out on a good node here and there. As for sales, you're not wrong there.
If the leaks are true and AD102 is 2.2X vs GA102 and Navi 31 2.5X vs Navi 21 the difference with the current flagships is going to be huge, we may start seeing CPU-limited behaviour even at 4K in some titles for flagships AD102/Navi 31 with current CPUs.
AMD controls Zen4 launch so unless we see 13900K at the end of july/early August (it's possible), if Nvidia wants to launch first it may not launch ada with AD102 but with AD103 as top and launch AD102 at a later date [when the new CPUs are widely available or right after Navi 31, whichever comes first], trying to mitigate the CPU limited behaviour, therefore maximizing the performance delta vs last gen.
Maybe, maybe not, I'm hang back by the fact that although the new CPUs will be faster, we are not talking about earth-shuttering difference, so i don't know how much will help alleviate the CPU limited effects and of course let's not forget that those that will pay +$2000-3000 for a VGA will not care much if the ada102 is 2X instead of 2.2X lol.