Discussion Ada/'Lovelace'? Next gen Nvidia gaming architecture speculation

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GodisanAtheist

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2006
7,063
7,489
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I guess Nvidia finally realized that it too has to add a big ol' block of LLC to keep up with bandwidth demands without scaling up the memory bus to ludicrous levels. Hindsight will tell us whether Nvidia's approach of using a large, traditional memory bus supplemented with a smaller LLC is better than going all out on cache with a smaller memory bus a la AMD's Infinity Cache. If in the generation following Lovelace we see Nvidia sticking with the same bus width or even reducing it, but adding even more cache, we'd know that AMD's approach won out.

- Taking a bet? I'd suspect no, otherwise they'd have done it a long time ago since this really isn't anything new, its just throwing more of the same at the problem. It will undoubtedly help, but the trade off will end up being absolutely gargantuan die sizes (and prices, which NV now knows people are willing to pay).

AMD has some outstanding EEs and hardware devs and RDNA2 looks like it was the result of some smart collaboration between their CPU team and their GPU team. NV certainly has some brilliant engineers no doubt, but they've generally come off as a much more iterative in their designs and less likely to swing for the fences like AMD is prone to doing
 

Saylick

Diamond Member
Sep 10, 2012
3,385
7,151
136
- Taking a bet? I'd suspect no, otherwise they'd have done it a long time ago since this really isn't anything new, its just throwing more of the same at the problem. It will undoubtedly help, but the trade off will end up being absolutely gargantuan die sizes (and prices, which NV now knows people are willing to pay).

AMD has some outstanding EEs and hardware devs and RDNA2 looks like it was the result of some smart collaboration between their CPU team and their GPU team. NV certainly has some brilliant engineers no doubt, but they've generally come off as a much more iterative in their designs and less likely to swing for the fences like AMD is prone to doing
What's likely forcing or forced Nvidia's hand is that GDDR7 wasn't ready in time, power constraints prevented them from using a 512-bit memory bus, cost constraints prevented them from using HBM, and memory compression techniques have already been tapped. I think historically Nvidia could have relied upon either a new memory standard or tricks to get the bandwidth they needed, but now seems like one of the few avenues left was adding cache, mainly as a supplement to the traditional memory system instead of the cache being the crux of the memory system. With AMD's approach, I imagine you need prefetching to keep the cache full of the most important data, which is where their CPU designers come in. I doubt Nvidia has the same level of expertise on that front. Also, as we all know, cache doesn't scale well with smaller nodes these days, so that 96 MB for AD102 is going to cost more per mm2 than IF Cache did for RDNA2, even though on RDNA 2 the IF Cache physically took up more area. It's clear that at least with respect to caching tech, AMD has the advantage and will extend it with RDNA 3 when they isolate an even larger cache on the older, more cost effective, and cache-optimized node.
 
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Frenetic Pony

Senior member
May 1, 2012
218
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- Taking a bet? I'd suspect no, otherwise they'd have done it a long time ago since this really isn't anything new, its just throwing more of the same at the problem. It will undoubtedly help, but the trade off will end up being absolutely gargantuan die sizes (and prices, which NV now knows people are willing to pay).

AMD has some outstanding EEs and hardware devs and RDNA2 looks like it was the result of some smart collaboration between their CPU team and their GPU team. NV certainly has some brilliant engineers no doubt, but they've generally come off as a much more iterative in their designs and less likely to swing for the fences like AMD is prone to doing

Eh, I'd say they're definitely going down the LLC route, same as intel will. Bandwidth optimization is a problem across the entire high performance industry, and if one option works well for one company it'll likely work at least decently for every other. Thus a concentration on sram cache, same as with CPUs.

In fact if you really want to guess at the specs of next gen cards you can just look at bandwidth limitations. Worked nigh perfectly for me with RDNA2 and Ampere, and I'm willing to bet it'll be similar again this year. 512bit buses are in the seeming "red zone" for chip makers, who far prefer going out of their way to acquire faster ram over building a bus that big for whatever reason. HBM is an option but significantly more expensive than GDDR, thus at the farthest end might end up on $2000+ cards. That leaves us with faster ram, and the fastest possible ram this year is 24gbps announced by Samsung, but the timeline for that was vague at best. Maybe 20gbps might be much more commonly available, and 21gbps for GDDRX.

That leaves giant caches as basically the only option for Nvidia. We can't assume their engineers are magical all seeing ones anymore than the ones that work at AMD or elsewhere, so one was gotten over on them a bit. Though I can see the logic behind preferring faster access to main ram. As RDNA2 demonstrates, a giant cache isn't some universal silver bullet, especially against deferred rendering which needs a ton of bandwidth to fill it's gbuffer and where RDNA2 obviously suffers performance issues.

Which is also why I don't believe the rumors of RDNA3 maxing out at a 256bit bus for even a moment. The 6900xt is already performance capped in numerous titles by it's limited ram bandwidth versus the 6800xt, which it should be over 20% more performant than across the board but isn't, thus the refresh with 18gbps ram that's coming up. Thus we can see that in all likelihood Nvidia will get a bigger cache, AMD will get a bigger bus, and we'll just go from there.
 
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eek2121

Diamond Member
Aug 2, 2005
3,051
4,276
136
Things should be interesting for NV/AMD next gen. Surprised that rumors indicate NV isn't going the MCM route, while AMD is clearly going MCM. I wonder what happened for NV?
 

dr1337

Senior member
May 25, 2020
385
639
136
Per the leaks its not so much LLC as it is a massive boost to L2 cache. Though I'd be first to suspect driver obfuscation trickery here, like nvidia is about to rename their current L1 as L0 and introduce a 'new' L1 that takes the place of the old style L2. However given its on TSMC n5 and there are ways to work around the drawbacks from large cache pools, surely anything is possible.

I was just thinking the other day about how nvidia was planning to feed so many cuda cores... hopefully thing get even more exciting from here
 
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Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
8,009
6,454
136
Things should be interesting for NV/AMD next gen. Surprised that rumors indicate NV isn't going the MCM route, while AMD is clearly going MCM. I wonder what happened for NV?

AMD already having some experience with Zen as well as working with TSMC and using some of their new die stacking technology and gaining experience with it likely makes the transition easier for them to pull off.

It's a bigger leap for NVidia and they frankly I'm not sure they need to make it. Even with AMD making up a lot of lost ground in the last generation with RDNA2, NVidia still has a lead and several advantages with their existing position that would make it difficult for AMD to gain substantial inroads before NVidia could get an MCM design to market.
 
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jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,841
5,456
136
Did a Q&D of a possible SM counts... what do you think?

Titan A - 144
4090 Ti - 136
4090 - 120
4080 Ti - 104
4080 - 84
4070 Ti - 72
4070 - 60
4060 Ti - 44
4060 - 36 / 32
4050 Ti - 28
4050 - 20
 

Glo.

Diamond Member
Apr 25, 2015
5,763
4,667
136
107 die should have 24 SMs, 32 MB of L2 on 6 nm process.

Expect also that this die will be clock very high - like 2300-2400 MHz.

We are looking at 3060 performance from full die.
 
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Frenetic Pony

Senior member
May 1, 2012
218
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AMD already having some experience with Zen as well as working with TSMC and using some of their new die stacking technology and gaining experience with it likely makes the transition easier for them to pull off.

It's a bigger leap for NVidia and they frankly I'm not sure they need to make it. Even with AMD making up a lot of lost ground in the last generation with RDNA2, NVidia still has a lead and several advantages with their existing position that would make it difficult for AMD to gain substantial inroads before NVidia could get an MCM design to market.

Nvidia's "lead" is far less than you are supposing. The only thing they're leading in technology wise is raytracing performance, to get their performance otherwise they needed to push TDP to the absolute highest it could go, and it appears they aren't stopping that. RDNA2 is just far more energy efficient otherwise, and TDP can be a major bottleneck once bandwidth is overcome, which Nvidia will need to take into account regardless.

Looking at it, even worse for Nvidia is that AMD seems like it might actually pull off multi die GPUs this year. This is an advance not to be taken lightly at all, it's probably the most significant cost down for GPUs in over a decade. AMD could certainly overtake Nvidia in performance this year, and beat them across the board on price/performance. The savings from cutting down on the giant dies higher end GPUs tend use vastly outweighs even high initial packaging costs. Think of it this way: When AMD delivered chiplets for Zen people still suspected they'd be going out of business any moment. Now they're worth more than Intel by market cap.

Bringing it back around to Nvidia, it's why I believe those old rumors that Nvidia is desperate to replace Ada with their own multi die GPU asap. Intel looks like it could have multi die next year as well, meaning Nvidia may realistically be in a race to catch up to its rivals within about a years time, not in the lead of anything.
 
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jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,841
5,456
136
Expect also that this die will be clock very high - like 2300-2400 MHz.

I think clock speeds could be much higher than that.. especially with the rumors of crazy TBP (600? 800?) at the highest end.
 

Thala

Golden Member
Nov 12, 2014
1,355
653
136
RDNA2 is just far more energy efficient otherwise, and TDP can be a major bottleneck once bandwidth is overcome, which Nvidia will need to take into account regardless.

I am not sure how you can conclude this, when the SoCs you are comparing use different fabrication technology.
 
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Glo.

Diamond Member
Apr 25, 2015
5,763
4,667
136
I think clock speeds could be much higher than that.. especially with the rumors of crazy TBP (600? 800?) at the highest end.
For 107 die?

107 die is made on different node. 102 is made on 5 nm, 107 and 106 are going to be made on N6 from TSMC, the same as N23.

Don't expect miracles, don't expect sub 75W GPU, don't expect that it will be less than 90W.
 

maddogmcgee

Senior member
Apr 20, 2015
385
310
136
I would suggest that if a person is worried about the cost of electricity to game and use their computer that they shouldn't do either and concentrate on the true necessities of life.

I mean, businesses consider the power cost because it's an important part of the total cost. I don't see why individuals shouldn't consider power for items they have on most of the time. . It's a hidden cost but is certainly there. Obviously how much you care also comes down to where you live in the world. Power is relatively expensive in Australia compared to the cheaper states in the US, and power prices in Europe are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
 
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Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
8,009
6,454
136
Nvidia's "lead" is far less than you are supposing. The only thing they're leading in technology wise is raytracing performance

RT isn't important at all in my opinion and I was talking more about things like CUDA where they essentially have vendor lock in. Even if AMD had a monster and blows out NVidia by 30% in some kind of wild surprise upset or just NVidia dropping the ball, most of those customers aren't going to change. They might put off upgrading, but it would take a more long term domination from AMD for people to consider dropping NVidia.

We all know that NVidia has some mindshare that translates into an attitude where many people won't even consider AMD even now when they have essentially even performance with NVidia. I'm curious what the magic number as far performance lead over NVidia AMD would need to hit to change the mind of those gamers. Even if AMD manages to pull off some wins the next round due to having MCM, unless it's at least a 15% lead I don't know if it will do them any good. I think NVidia's mindshare is enough that even many gamers who buy NVidia will find some excuse to pass on AMD again.
 

scineram

Senior member
Nov 1, 2020
361
283
106
For the current gen Nvidia was also able to get massive shipments from Samsung. So AMD lost lots of market share. Next time they will all compete for TSMC? Does Lovelace have a chip for cheaper node like Navi 33?
 

CP5670

Diamond Member
Jun 24, 2004
5,527
604
126
RT isn't important at all in my opinion and I was talking more about things like CUDA where they essentially have vendor lock in. Even if AMD had a monster and blows out NVidia by 30% in some kind of wild surprise upset or just NVidia dropping the ball, most of those customers aren't going to change. They might put off upgrading, but it would take a more long term domination from AMD for people to consider dropping NVidia.

We all know that NVidia has some mindshare that translates into an attitude where many people won't even consider AMD even now when they have essentially even performance with NVidia. I'm curious what the magic number as far performance lead over NVidia AMD would need to hit to change the mind of those gamers. Even if AMD manages to pull off some wins the next round due to having MCM, unless it's at least a 15% lead I don't know if it will do them any good. I think NVidia's mindshare is enough that even many gamers who buy NVidia will find some excuse to pass on AMD again.

For me the main value of Nvidia is that I'm familiar with all their third party tools and driver settings at this point, like Nvidia Inspector, Rivatuner, etc. I migrate all my Nvidia Inspector settings (for 100+ older games) whenever I get a new card. It would take me a lot of effort to figure out how to make everything work the same way on AMD, and it may not even be possible for some old games.
 
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jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,841
5,456
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For the current gen Nvidia was also able to get massive shipments from Samsung. So AMD lost lots of market share. Next time they will all compete for TSMC? Does Lovelace have a chip for cheaper node like Navi 33?

Depending on how crypto prices go nVidia could sell Ampere @ MSRP for some time even after Ada's release.
 

GodisanAtheist

Diamond Member
Nov 16, 2006
7,063
7,489
136
Depending on how crypto prices go nVidia could sell Ampere @ MSRP for some time even after Ada's release.

-At this rate NV/AMD could keep selling this gen for another 1/2 years before they really saturate the market and need to release a new consumer line.

They've colluded before and I would never put it passed them to collide again.
 

Frenetic Pony

Senior member
May 1, 2012
218
179
116
Guess the 600w makes sense, that matches up with the new even higher end PCI Express 5.0 power ratings. Never did see how much use a server/OAM only card that 850 watts or whatever would take. So I'll call this more plausible than previous leaks.

Versus AMD which is... Multi Die and? The leaks have been ridiculously implausible there otherwise so I guess we'll just wait and see. Though the GDDR7 part seems silly, afaik it's not even done being finalized by JEDEC as a spec yet, let alone coming out this year.
 

moonbogg

Lifer
Jan 8, 2011
10,637
3,095
136
The 4070 looks like the best option if they can keep them in stock and priced around $2000, which would give the typical high-end gamer something to look forward to.
 

Timorous

Golden Member
Oct 27, 2008
1,727
3,152
136
When they say RT performance is double does that mean that the % performance loss from turning RT on is halved or does it mean you get double the frames which mean RT efficiency is about the same?
 

OscaAndShintjee

Junior Member
Feb 22, 2022
16
11
36

If this is true, doesn't this effectively make buying any Ampere cards even with the dropping prices an absolute waste of money (unless you need a gaming-capable card right this moment)? I'd be willing to hold off on buying a 3070 if the so-called '4070' is going to surpass even enthusiast-level current-generation cards like the 3090.
 

Borealis7

Platinum Member
Oct 19, 2006
2,914
205
106
nVidia has solved the mining problem! by making cards that draw enormous amounts of power, they make mining on them not profitable! Praise Jensen!
 
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