Despite the rollout of GeForce Ampere graphics cards being very much incomplete, Twitter tech leaker wires are buzzing with talk of next gen Lovelace GPUs. Various well known leakers have purported GPU specs and roadmap info but it is admittedly rather early for this kind of information as Lovelace isn't expected to be official until 2022.
Kopite4kimi seems to be the source that first turned the spotlight onto Ada Lovelace as the next gen family of GPUs for GeForce gamers. It is thought that Lovelace is stepping to the fore as a monolithic series of GPUs for gamers as the multi-chip design of Hopper might be prosumer/professional/HPC only and might be somewhat delayed. Lovelace GPUs will come with a codename beginning with AD, with the top dog being the AD102. Kopite4kimi has more recently proposed that while GA102 has a 7x6 structure, the AD102 GPU will have a 12x6 Texture Processing Clusters structure.
Sites like 3DCenter and VideoCardz have taken the AD102 ball and run with it to come to the following educated guesses for Lovelace AD102 GPU specs:
- 12 Graphics Processing Clusters
- 72 Texture Processing Clusters
- 144 Streaming Multiprocessors
- 18,432 CUDA cores
So, AD102 could have a significant increase in CUDA cores compared to GA102 (71 per cent more) and it is further estimated that the above top Lovelace GPU could achieve 66TFlops @1.8 GHz.
Nvidia GTC 2018 Heroes T-Shirt detail
Even if the above is true there is quite a lot of detail up in the air right now. For example, no one knows at what foundry/process Lovelace will be fabricated, though a hat is tipped at Samsung 5nm. As for timescales, as per our intro, Nvidia is still in the midst of its GeForce Ampere rollout. In spring one might hope for it to have completed addressing the various market segments (especially lower tier) before announcing RTX 30 Super GPUs at Computex in June perhaps. It might be a year later before RTX 40 series graphics cards become a thing.
