Nvidia’s next-gen flagship graphics card, the RTX 4090, is expected to pack some serious power, with fresh leaks appearing regarding its specifications.
According to Twitter user @Greymon55, the 4090 (codenamed AD102) will be built using TSMC’s 5nm process with 18,432 CUDA cores, which is 7,936 more than the current generation RTX 3090, and a clock speed anticipated to be around 2.3GHz to 2.5GHz.
AD1025nm TSMC144SM 18432CUDA384bit 24G GDDR6X 21Gbps？2.3~2.5GHz？85~92T FP32？November 9, 2021
As TweakTown reports, we’re anticipating between 85 TFLOPs and 92 TFLOPs of compute performance. For context, the GeForce RTX 3090 (Nvidia’s current flagship) has 35.5 TFLOPs, and while it’s important to note that TFLOPs isn’t the be-all and end-all of performance, on paper these specifications indicated the Lovelace flagship is going to be a beast.
According to the power supply specification of pcie5, the TGP range of AD102 must be 450-650w.November 9, 2021
And a power-hungry beast at that, with early rumors of possible 450W to 500W power requirements now having another estimate by Greymon55 of between 450W to 650W, double the TDP of existing Ampere cards. This could mean that the RTX 4090 will require a 1200W power supply to run, which is a frankly alarming prospect.
Naturally, this isn’t enough to consider the information concrete, but Greymon55 is a well-established tech leaker with a proven record that gives weight to the information.
Still, to avoid disappointment don’t take any of the information as gospel. Nvidia’s Lovelace graphics cards are expected to emerge at some stage in 2022, perhaps before the final quarter of next year rolls around.
Analysis: Will we ever see the RTX 3090 Ti?
If nothing else, we will see 4090, 4080 and 4070 in 2022Q3. I don’t think this is new information.November 8, 2021
Initial speculation regarding Nvidia’s Lovelace plans suggested the new architecture would be released at the end of 2022, but things have since developed and there’s now speculation that it could appear a bit earlier than that, with a 2022 Q3 release seeming the most likely prospect.
It was anticipated that Nvidia would be releasing a suped-up RTX 3090 in the form of either an RTX 3090 Ti or 3090 Super, but with such an early release date anticipated for the next generation of cards, we would be surprised if further additions to the current Ampere family were made now.
It’s likely that if additional desktop graphics cards are announced in January at CES or as late as Computex in May then the Q3 estimation for 2022 might be premature, but we won’t know for sure until an official announcement is made from Team Green.
With demand for silicon so high, many PC gamers and building hobbyists have been unable to secure this generation of products to upgrade their current system, so it’ll be interesting to see how Nvidia has navigated the difficulties of developing a new product amidst the complaints of the lack of current inventory.