Compared with PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0 can double the bandwidth, from 64GB/s to 128GB/s. At the same time, AMD and Intel have successively introduced PCIe 5 specifications on new consumer-grade and computing-grade platforms. NVIDIA also announced new The first-generation AI supercomputing GPU product NVIDIA H100 “Hopper” emphasized support for the PCIe 5.0 interface, but according to reports, the next-generation consumer product RTX 40 “Ada Lovelace”, which is expected to be launched at the end of this year, will maintain PCIe 4.0 channel technology.
From a marketing point of view, NVIDIA’s strategy seems a bit surprising. After all, flagship products with a new generation of technical specifications will be more topical. It is currently rumored that the flagship product RTX 4090 will be equipped with AD102 chip and equipped with 24Gbps GDDR6X memory. At the same time, the power of 600W is achieved through the 16-pin power supply slot of the ATX 3.0 specification; however, according to the whistleblower Kopite7kimi, NVIDIA’s flagship chip AD102 in the first wave of Ampere will still maintain the PCIe 4.0 specification.
▲ AI supercomputing grade NVIDIA H100 has taken the lead in adopting PCIe 5.0, but the consumer-grade RTX 40 may stay at PCIe 4.0 specification
The main reason may be related to the current situation of consumer-grade products, because the current computing performance of consumer-grade GPU products has not yet used the 64GB/s bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 (two-way 32GB/s bandwidth), which is not as required by computing-grade products. For multi-card communication or direct access to a large amount of data from SSD, the announcement and marketing significance of using PCIe 5.0 is greater than the hardware specification requirements.
Attention, I never talked regarding the details of SM.
Don’t preconceived that AD102 has a simple 18432-FP32.– kopite7kimi (@ kopite7kimi) April 22, 2022
However, this does not mean that the RTX 40 series will maintain the PCIe 4.0 specification during the product cycle. After all, AMD will also provide PCIe 5.0 specifications on consumer platforms by then. If AMD’s new-generation Radeon graphics cards and Intel’s Arc graphics cards also use PCIe 5.0 Specifications, NVIDIA may also join the PCIe 5.0 specification in the follow-up with a small revised product line such as “Ti”.