Nvidia RTX 4080 / 4090 leaks point to extremely power hungry cards
The launch of Nvidia’s next gen Lovelace GPUs draws nearer, and that means it’s leak season! A purported approximation of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 Founders Edition PCB has hit the web, and it gives us a lot to ponder. The first thing to consider is the VRM phase count. With no less than 24 phases for what is likely a standard Founders Edition card, it’s clear that talk of very high TDPs for high end RTX 40 cards is accurate.
The leak comes via Igor’s Lab. The PCB overview indicates that the card includes space for 12 GDDR6X memory chips. This would indicate that the RTX 4090 will include 24GB of VRAM while the RTX 4080 will include 12GB, likely over a 384-bit bus. That’s the same as what’s available now.
Igor's Lab believes that the GA102 and next gen AD102 GPUs are pin-to-pin compatible. This means that manufacturers can re-use their current high end designs and that upcoming RTX 3090 Ti PCBs will likely carry over to RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 class cards. The 3090 Ti is also set to introduce the PCIe 5.0 power connector. If we assume the rumoured 450W+ TDP of the 3090 Ti is accurate, then it can be considered something of a test run before the main RTX 40 event.
Lovelace GPUs are set to be manufactured on TSMC's 4N fabrication process which is tweaked specifically for Nvidia. Despite the significantly smaller node, those rumours of 600W or even higher TDPs just won’t go away. Bear in mind we’re talking about the enthusiast class cards here, where power consumption is typically secondary to performance. We hope that the mid range and entry level cards will end up a lot more power thrifty. Imagine the hassles system integrators will face if they have to accommodate a 300W entry to mid level GPU.
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