maximumpc.com JAN 2020 MAXIMUMPC 15
Jarred Walton
TECH TALK
Jarred Walton
TECH TALK
Jarred Walton has been a
PC and gaming enthusiast
for over 30 years.©^
MU
ND
FIS
H
What We Can Expect
Next from Nvidia
To be clear, anyone claiming to have specifications
for the RTX 3080 right now is making stuff up. But
even if we don’t know the exact specs, looking at
the underlying tech—TSMC’s and Samsung’s 7nm
process technologies—can provide a good sense
of what Nvidia is likely to do.
Nvidia GPUs build on each preceding generation,
adding features and improvements. Turing is like
Pascal, with new ray-tracing and Tensor hardware,
concurrent FP and INT execution, an improved
NVENC block for video encoding, and some other
tweaks. Pascal is like Maxwell, with tweaks to
the architecture and some new features; Pascal
also marked a transition from 28nm lithography
to 16nm FinFET. Maxwell built on two generations
of Kepler GPUs, with better memory compression
and some VR-specific features that didn’t catch on.
This next transition is going to be the most like
the Maxwell to Pascal move, because it’s not just
about tuning the architecture. The next GeForce
series will shrink the process from 12nm to 7nm,
paving the way for big improvements. I also expect
Nvidia to be less ambitious on pricing, as the RTX
20-series didn’t sell as many units as anticipated.
The lack of interest from cryptocurrency miners
probably had a lot to do with that.
Nvidia isn’t likely to do a straight die shrink;
i n s t e a d , i t w i l l p a c k m o r e f e a t u r e s a n d h a r d w a r e i n t oWHAT DOES NVIDIA have planned for its next round of
graphics cards? The Turing architecture is coming
up on its second birthday, and after the Superrefresh, everyone is looking to 7nm and the Ampere
architecture. At least, I think it’s called Ampere—
Nvidia is being tight-lipped, as usual.
Ampere GPUs: more RT cores for
ray tracing, more CUDA cores
for general graphics, and more
Tensor cores for machine learning.
There will also probably be new
tech to improve performance, as
Nvidia does that every generation—
stuff like variable rate shading.
Looking to AMD’s 7nm parts
gives a good idea of how the 7nm
process scales. The Vega 20 in
the Radeon VII is about 30 percent
smaller than Vega 10, while packing
in 6 percent more transistors. Even
better, the Navi 10 GPU is almost
half as large as Vega 10, and the
5700 XT easily outperforms the
RX Vega 64, while using 225W
instead of 295W. Some of that is
architecture, but lots comes from
TSMC’s 7nm lithography.
Nvidia can already beat AMD’s
RX 5700 XT, and its Ampere RTX
3080 GPUs will be even faster.
It’s easy to imagine Nvidia putting
20–25 percent more cores in each
level of GPU hardware. The 7nm
process should allow Nvidia to
clock those cores 20–25 percent
higher, too, so Nvidia could have
GPUs consistently running at over
2.0GHz. Even with the added cores
and features, die sizes should be
smaller than Turing equivalents.
We could be looking at a
generational improvement inperformance of 40-50 percent or
more for RTX 3080, with a chip
that’s still 15 percent smaller than
the RTX 2080. What’s more, we
might not have to wait too long.
TSMC has been making 7nm
chips since 2018, when the Apple
A12 launched. AMD started selling
7nm in late 2018, and has been
selling lots of 7nm CPUs and GPUs
since July 2019. The time is ripe for
Nvidia to launch its first 7nm par ts,
and past experience suggests that
spring 2020 would be ideal.
If you still have a GTX 10-series
or similar, or even a GTX 900,
you may finally find a reason to
upgrade. And wouldn’t it be perfect
if Nvidia launched RTX 30-series
parts, with far better ray-
tracing performance, in time for
Cyberpunk 2077? Maybe we’ll have
to wait for Vampire: Bloodlines 2,
but Cyberpunk is the bigger target.
Nvidia GPUs build on each
preceding generation, adding
features and improvements.The RTX 3080 will likely be 7nm
and double down on ray tracing,
as used in Atomic Heart.