Wednesday, October 26th 2022
NVIDIA Partners Beginning to Carve Out RTX 3070 Ti From Larger GA102 Dies
NVIDIA manufactured a heap of large "GA102" Ampere silicon to cater to demand from the crypto-mining boom; only to see that demand vanish. With next-gen RTX 40-series awaiting ramp; the company has to digest these GA102 chips somehow, and is apparently letting its partners use them on performance-segment SKUs such as the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. The RTX 3070 Ti is normally based on the GA104 silicon, which it maxes out, enabling all 6,144 CUDA cores, 48 RT cores, 192 Tensor cores, 192 TMUs, and 96 ROPs, besides the chip's full 256-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface. This SKU is now being carved out on the larger GA102, by enabling 48 out of 84 streaming multiprocessors (just 57% of the CUDA cores enabled); and narrowing the memory bus from its normal 384-bit, down to 256-bit.
The memory size remains at 8 GB, memory type at GDDR6X, and memory speed at 19 Gbps, working out to 608 GB/s of bandwidth. The most interesting aspect of carving the RTX 3070 Ti out of the GA102 has to be board power; with a ZOTAC-branded card listing it at 320 W, higher than the 290 W of GA104-based cards from the company. Sadly, this is a China-only SKU. Every custom-design graphics card, especially from a reputed AIC such as ZOTAC, has to go through qualification with NVIDIA; which means NVIDIA is not only aware of GA102-based RTX 3070 Ti cards, but is behind fusing the SMs to carve out the SKU, and developing the video BIOS and driver support. ZOTAC is kind enough to list the ASIC code on its website, and for this SKU it is "GA102-150-xx."
Source:
VideoCardz
The memory size remains at 8 GB, memory type at GDDR6X, and memory speed at 19 Gbps, working out to 608 GB/s of bandwidth. The most interesting aspect of carving the RTX 3070 Ti out of the GA102 has to be board power; with a ZOTAC-branded card listing it at 320 W, higher than the 290 W of GA104-based cards from the company. Sadly, this is a China-only SKU. Every custom-design graphics card, especially from a reputed AIC such as ZOTAC, has to go through qualification with NVIDIA; which means NVIDIA is not only aware of GA102-based RTX 3070 Ti cards, but is behind fusing the SMs to carve out the SKU, and developing the video BIOS and driver support. ZOTAC is kind enough to list the ASIC code on its website, and for this SKU it is "GA102-150-xx."
25 Comments on NVIDIA Partners Beginning to Carve Out RTX 3070 Ti From Larger GA102 Dies
As odd as it sounds, I do miss SLI, but I'm probably one of the few that feels this way. I never really had any issues with SLI.
aint Karma a filthy, rotten, smelly biotch ?
If you start talking normal person about ga-102's and ga-104's their eyes will just gloss over and they tune you out - normal people don't care.
The cards are for the Chinese market so confusion should be minimal.
AMD does the same thing, only worse. AMD would sell ga-104's in China as 3080's, as they did with the "RX 580" - like that's not going to confuse people.That's fine I guess, but Nvidia didn't create the pandemic, and they were certainly not the only corporation to take advantage of the situation.
Everyone was happy to sell to their GPU's to miners, and people bought from the scalpers, so you could point fingers all day long.
I do miss the days of getting cheap GPU's. I just don't think that Nvidia failing is going to make GPU's cheaper and more available.It's not like Samsung has the chips on a shelf for Nvidia to go pick up any time.
They were probably ordered a long time ago, and now demands have shifted so they are going to end up being used differently.
I owned a 3070Ti 8GB and it was a trash gaming GPU. Only good for mining.
8GB in 2022 is a fucking literal joke.
Let's not forget the "8GB 3060" to further screw with consumers.
Its just less efficient, even if a little, its definitely less trying to disguise as equal.Inb4 'but that's just loaded, not used capacity'
...and the accompanying stutter on the vast majority of Nvidia's line up when you start pushing it :)
B. And I neva implied that I wanted them to fail, merely that they deserve to suffer a bit as a direct result of their excessive greed, now that the pandemic is almost over, and the fact that they have yet to reduce their GPU prices back to anywhere near pre-pandemic/scalper-induced levels will hopefully speed up this process significantly....
With the highest inflation rate in many years and the dwindling pool of people who have an extra $1-2k just laying around that they can spend on a new GPU (or many other things too), and the overall decrease in demand for all things pc-related, they WILL get what is coming to them, one way or the other, at which time I shall be all smiles from ear to ear.... and yes, I realize this whole situation applies to many other aspects of our daily lives too....