Nvidia Ampere is here, and its the architecture behind the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series.
It’s official: Nvidia Ampere is the architecture that the manufacturer’s next-generation GPUs are based on. Nvidia’s mysterious September 1 event launched its three shiny new GPUs – the RTX 3080, its flagship, RTX 3070, and the Titan-level RTX 3090 – and they’re all breathtaking. After months of rumors and speculations – as well as a bit of doubt, as Nvidia Ampere was initially released mostly for data center devices with no GeForce in sight, just like Volta a few years ago – Nvidia has confirmed the first three GPUs in its latest RTX series, alongside other exciting announcements like Nvidia Broadcast and new 360Hz G-Sync displays. And, they’re all hitting the streets this fall. It’s one of the most exciting Nvidia announcements in the mainstream market yet, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself saying «To all my Pascal gaming friends, it is safe to upgrade now.» But, there’s certainly more to Nvidia Ampere than these GPUs. The company has been putting in the hours on the A100 GPU, for what should hopefully be a 20x improvement in computing power. With the explosive growth in cloud computing, AI is increasingly integral and important. Whether it’s Amazon building grocery stores that enable instant purchasing when you throw something in your cart, or IoT devices littering your home, or even self-driving cars, more and more computing power is needed.7nm Ampere architecture, as well as the 3rd generation Tensor Cores, are a huge part of that. Any business needing such hefty computing power should be able to take advantage of the data center GPU, like the DGX A100 which is a rack of eight A100 GPUs costing $1 million. In fact, Google Compute Engine already has. It’s possible that Microsoft, Dell and Amazon have already bought in or will soon. As for its RTX 3000 series GPUs, Nvidia is also bringing out the big guns, which isn’t surprising as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is probably the most anticipated piece of kit in the tech world at the moment. Ampere RTX, according to Jensen, will come with 30 Shader-TFLOPS,58 RT-TFLOPS and 238 Tensor-TFLOPS, delivering twice the performance and energy efficiency of Turing. We’re excited to take these first three RTX 3000 GPUs out for a spin, and see exactly what they’re made of. But, until then, we’ll update this page with more information as it becomes available so keep it bookmarked for the latest on Nvidia Ampere. The first wave of the highly-anticipated 3000-series graphics cards has just been launched at the Nvidia September 1 event, somewhat confirming recent rumor alleging that Nvidia will launch three new graphics cards in September. The RTX 3000 flagship, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, is going to be available on September 17 to be followed by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 on September 24. The RTX 3070, which is poised to replace the RTX 2080 Ti, is slated to be released sometime in October, though no official date has been announced. With the next-generation consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X likely launching around November, we certainly expected Nvidia to launch its next-generation GeForce cards around the same time to capitalize on the next-gen gaming hype. Once the cards are actually out, water cooling should be available immediately for early adopters. The first three GPUs in the RTX 3000 series has just been announced, alongside their respective price tags, and we’re happy to report that two-thirds of them are priced competitively. This is great news for consumers. These cards will be a hot commodity when they are released, so there’s definitely reason for Nvidia to price them even higher than Turing cards.
