Nvidia Ampere GPU's 250W TPD Suggests RTX 3090 Rumors Are Right

The tech community has yet to see the new Nvidia Ampere GPU but the 250W TDP of the new A100 PCIe card suggests that the rumors about the RTX 3090 might actually be right. This week, Nvidia dropped a version of its top GA100 graphics silicon that is sure to power up gaming PCs.

The new Nvidia Ampere A100 PCIe features a sleek design that fits into a PCIe motherboard slot. Used with an AMD X570 and another video card, this card can produce an output that will definitely satisfy any gamer.

Although the Nvidia Ampere A100 PCIe does not have ports, it operates better with lower TDP than the previously released Nvidia A100 for HGX that uses the SXM board form factor. It is also notable that the PCIe version has a more reasonable TDP of 250W, compared with the first Ampere card’s 400W.

The new graphics card also comes with the same GA100 Ampere GPU and HBM2 memory but it has an amazing bandwidth and all other kinds of features that gamers will love. Despite dropping 150W of max TDP, Nvidia has reported only a 10% decline in performance of “top apps.”

Previous rumors suggested that the top GeForce Ampere cards would hit 350W of total board power. Many found the rumors unfeasible, considering that a 350W TBP seemed too high for a 7nm part. Also, the TBP of the Turing generation is significantly lower than the floating speculations.

It is important to note, however, that while the TBP refers to how much power the total graphics card can pull on its own, the thermal design point (TDP) is used in reference to how much power the attached cooler needs to dissipate. In some cases, the two terms are wrongfully interchanged.

For instance, the Nvidia RTX 2080’s TDP is 215W, while that is what Nvidia rates as its TBP and not TDP. The actual TDP of the RTX 2080 is below 148W, with the 45% difference between the two figures is made up by the memory’s power demands and the power circuitry. If that follows with Ampere, then the rumored 350W and 320W figures for the initial three cards could be right.

If the GA100 GPU in PCIe trim has a TDP of 250W, then it only makes sense to assume that a GA102 version with GDDR6/X attached to it can deliver a TBP of 350W. The top GA102 will then have a TDP of 240W, while the cut-down RTX 3080, a 220W TDP.

It remains unknown whether the Nvidia Ampere is going to be behind the next GeForce cards, but it is expected to deliver up to 20x improvement in raw compute power. In a recent statement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang teased that the Ampere would be used in “all next-generation cards” and that when it comes to the two cards, there is going to be “great overlap in the architecture, but not in the configuration.”