Speculation and Rumors: Nvidia Blackwell ...

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You're correct, in that I'm unaware of any die shots of the upcoming chips giving us any idea of the size of the Broadwell options. The PHY limitation is just hypothesis for now, but is an entirely reasonable one.

It may not (only) be that NVIDIA is a bunch of cheap bastards ;)
 
homerdog said:
Is there not room around something like AD106 for 6 32bit interfaces? I can't find a die shot of AD106 and the shots I found of AD102 say they're not to scale.
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I would think it's unlikely that AD106 doesn't have a 192 bit bus because of design limitations in terms of actually implementing one. It's more likely that decision has considerations for things like cost, power, and product stack reasons.

It's worth remembering that Nvidia sells something like half their discrete GPUs to laptops. Their GPU product stack needs to cater to that as well. The physical and power considerations for 192 vs 128 is likely a bigger factor for that segment than desktop.

Albuquerque said:
It may not (only) be that NVIDIA is a bunch of cheap bastards ;)
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But we know it's not strictly a BoM issue for these decisions. Because otherwise it's trivial technically to offer a variant at BoM+margins for double sided (x2) VRAM for all desktop GPUs.

The only reason to not do this is due to wanting to segment the market.
 
arandomguy said:
But we know it's not strictly a BoM issue for these decisions. Because otherwise it's trivial technically to offer a variant at BoM+margins for double sided (x2) VRAM for all desktop GPUs.
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Something technically "trivial" (which is also not necessarily true, because that means design changes and thus more validations) does not mean it's trivial in marketing and retail.
 
arandomguy said:
I would think it's unlikely that AD106 doesn't have a 192 bit bus because of design limitations in terms of actually implementing one. It's more likely that decision has considerations for things like cost, power, and product stack reasons.
Click to expand...
Well, yeah. Which is a design "limitation", i.e. you have to hit some cost of producing a chip for it to sell at a margin you want.

arandomguy said:
It's worth remembering that Nvidia sells something like half their discrete GPUs to laptops. Their GPU product stack needs to cater to that as well. The physical and power considerations for 192 vs 128 is likely a bigger factor for that segment than desktop.
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Both are equally important. A narrower bus usually means higher memory clocks, and it's not a given that such system would consume less power than the one with a wider bus but lower clocks.

arandomguy said:
But we know it's not strictly a BoM issue for these decisions. Because otherwise it's trivial technically to offer a variant at BoM+margins for double sided (x2) VRAM for all desktop GPUs.
Click to expand...
Not sure if I understood this properly: are you saying that putting 2X the memory chips on a card doesn't affect the BOM?
 
homerdog said:
Is there not room around something like AD106 for 6 32bit interfaces? I can't find a die shot of AD106 and the shots I found of AD102 say they're not to scale.
Click to expand...

AD106 is a strange chip. It’s small at 188mm^2 and barely larger than AD107. They must have been targeting a very specific laptop power profile or something.

They fit 50% more SMs in AD106 and it only increased die size by 18%. That implies all the non-SM bits (memory controllers, front end, encoders etc) are a significant chunk of both dies.
 
trinibwoy said:
AD106 is a strange chip. It’s small at 188mm^2 and barely larger than AD107. They must have been targeting a very specific laptop power profile or something.

They fit 50% more SMs in AD106 and it only increased die size by 18%. That implies all the non-SM bits (memory controllers, front end, encoders etc) are a significant chunk of both dies.
Click to expand...
Some numbers (guesses):
1735047814680.png
 
trinibwoy said:
AD106 is a strange chip. It’s small at 188mm^2 and barely larger than AD107. They must have been targeting a very specific laptop power profile or something.

They fit 50% more SMs in AD106 and it only increased die size by 18%. That implies all the non-SM bits (memory controllers, front end, encoders etc) are a significant chunk of both dies.
Click to expand...
AD107 is the weirder because it has way less SMs than AD106 and doubling of cache. I mean dies like AD107 are going to become extremely pointless with beefier APUs like Strix Halo's successors and whatever Intel & Nvidia's competitors to them look like. Like AD107 feels so niche and arguably pointless when AD106 could've been cut down (4060 Ti using a full die and then 4060 being a cut down die of it would've made more sense but heh this is Nvidia we're talking about).

Like if all three move onto Chiplet architectures I do expect all three to have a TSMC N3P, N3X etc equivalent node on a monlithic die (say a RTX 70 monolithic 128-bit die on TSMC N3X as the "entry" level card with 4GB GDDR7 Modules so a 16GB SKU or a cut down 12GB SKU) that's maybe AD106 equivalent of maximising compute power in a sub 200mm2 node that can have cut down variants.
IQandHDR said:
Some numbers (guesses):
*snip*
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Interesting chart, hopefully a simiar one because I wonder how much that 128MB L2 Cache + Analog will take up GB202 die space in terms of mm2? About 150? 200? 250? I mean 128MB of L2 Cache is probably one of the reasons why Nvidia stuck to an N4P node than N3E (it wouldn't be much smaller, what would be the point? and if RTX 60 is mostly Chiplet based then Nvidia can shave off the cache and analog parts to a cheaper node while the compute gets fancier TSMC N3P or equivalent).
 
DegustatoR said:
Intel had to inflate their BMG-G21 die to ~AD104 level to fit the 192 bit bus.
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This is a function of Intel's still poor architectural performance per mm² not anything inherent to the drastic impossibility of offering a half decent RAM pool for consumers in a given price tier.

Nvidia isn't actually skimping on RAM, they are simply selling you lower end parts with higher end names and prices. That's it. We dont need to pretend it's anything else.

It's greed.
 
Seanspeed said:
This is a function of Intel's still poor architectural performance per mm² not anything inherent to the drastic impossibility of offering a half decent RAM pool for consumers in a given price tier.
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Doubtful as the density is almost 2X worse than what Nvidia and AMD get on the same N5 process. It's either dark silicon - which is there for some reason - or Intel is lying about complexity - take your pick.
 
I want a 5090, but I'm curious as to how much I'd be able to get for my 4090. Looking on ebay and actual retail sites, these prices are ridiculous. They're still selling used for around $2000 - $3000CAD? That can't be right, can it? lmao. I'll sell it asap if that's the case.
 
Remij said:
I want a 5090, but I'm curious as to how much I'd be able to get for my 4090. Looking on ebay and actual retail sites, these prices are ridiculous. They're still selling used for around $2000 - $3000CAD? That can't be right, can it? lmao. I'll sell it asap if that's the case.
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Selling something before you'll be able to get something else - or even before knowing the price of that something else - can end up being not in your favor...
 
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