Has Nvidia finalised its next GPU architecture?
According to the latest leaks, the design of Nvidia's Lovelace architecture is ready. It will power the RTX-40 series. The same architecture is also reported to be featured in a new Switch version.
According to a Twitter post by @greymon55, the Lovelace architecture has been finalised. The leaker further reports that Lovelace will be manufactured with TSMC's 5 nm capacity.
The flagship Lovelace architecture graphics card, designated AD102, is said to feature 144 streaming multiprocessors (SM). The current top model RTX 3090 offers 82 SM. In terms of Cuda cores, this equals 18,432 with the AD102 compared to 10,496 with the RTX 3090. This would be a considerable increase of around 76 percent. The GPU clock is speculated to be over 2.2 GHz and GDDR6X is supposed to be used as memory.
Lovelace for the Switch?
The suspected specs sound excellent. Nevertheless, Nvidia is probably in fear of the competition from AMD. According to further rumours, Team Red's upcoming flagship card will outperform AMD's current best card, the 6900 XT, by a factor of 2.5. That’s quite some competition for Nvidia’s Lovelace. YouTuber and leaker Moore's Law is Dead therefore suspects that Nvidia wants to boost the production of their cards in the future and will launch their products at lower prices.
But that's not all. As Moore's Law is Dead adds, the Lovelace architecture isn’t only to be used on desktop PCs and notebooks, but will also feature in the as-yet-unannounced Nintendo Switch successor – based on an Nvidia Orin SoC. This is also used in self-driving cars.
If this is true, the new Switch isn’t expected until late 2022. Nvidia is known for keeping a two-year rhythm for graphics card architectures. There’s currently nothing to suggest that Team Green will do anything different this time. As always, take such rumours with a pinch of salt.
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