Wednesday, November 30th 2022
NVIDIA 4nm AD104 "Ada" Silicon Pictured, Half the Die-area of AD102
Here's the first picture of the 4 nm "AD104" silicon powering what would have been the $900 GeForce RTX 4080 12 GB, and upcoming RTX 4070-series graphics cards. The third largest GPU based on the "Ada Lovelace" graphics architecture, the AD104 looks tiny. This is because it has roughly half the die-area of the AD102, estimated to be around 295 mm² (compared to 608 mm² of the AD102), which means its transistor count should be less than half, with older reports pinpointing it to 35.8 billion. The RTX 4080 12 GB was supposed to max out the AD104 silicon, enabling all 60 streaming multiprocessors (SM) physically present.
The AD104 with 60 SM hence has 7,680 CUDA cores, 60 RT cores, 240 Tensor cores, 240 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. NVIDIA has generationally narrowed the memory interface (compared to the GA104 and TU104), down to 192-bit GDDR6X. Its predecessors such as the GA104 feature 256-bit wide memory interfaces. NVIDIA is overcoming the memory bus width "deficit" by giving SKUs based on the silicon higher memory speeds (21 Gbps or more); and architecture-level improvements such as larger on-die caches. NVIDIA is reportedly planning to launch an AD104-based SKU early January 2023. VideoCardz reports that could be the RTX 4070 Ti, a re-branding of the RTX 4080 12 GB.
Sources:
MEGAsizeGPU (Twitter), Videocardz
The AD104 with 60 SM hence has 7,680 CUDA cores, 60 RT cores, 240 Tensor cores, 240 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. NVIDIA has generationally narrowed the memory interface (compared to the GA104 and TU104), down to 192-bit GDDR6X. Its predecessors such as the GA104 feature 256-bit wide memory interfaces. NVIDIA is overcoming the memory bus width "deficit" by giving SKUs based on the silicon higher memory speeds (21 Gbps or more); and architecture-level improvements such as larger on-die caches. NVIDIA is reportedly planning to launch an AD104-based SKU early January 2023. VideoCardz reports that could be the RTX 4070 Ti, a re-branding of the RTX 4080 12 GB.
19 Comments on NVIDIA 4nm AD104 "Ada" Silicon Pictured, Half the Die-area of AD102
8nm Samsung vs 4nm tsmc.
GA104 (3070/3060 ti) was 392 mm2
NVIDIA has a long history of doing this only until demand is met- see the desktop rtx 3050, which officially uses a 106 cut, but the laptop Ti part uses the exact same 2560 core count 107!
I guarantee you the 4070ti will have a similar cut 103 PART TOO, early-on just not in any official spec sheet
And they will have to do a refresh.
But I guess they did it with Turing. 2080 and 2080 Ti came out together, and a year later there was a 2080 Super, but it was a refresh of the normal 2080, not the Ti. It makes no sense to me. 4070 Ti Super?
once yields improve, we could see a 4080 SE during product refresh (now that thjey haver high enouh yields of Ada 104 to make aall the deman for 4070 Ti plus cut 4070, and the yields on 103 is similarly improved)