Nvidia's enigmatic GA103 GPU finally spotted in the wild

Nvidia’s GA103 GPU has been rumored for years, but the chip has now been pictured for the first time thanks to the arrival of the RTX 3080 Ti mobility graphics card.

The official introduction of the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 Ti earlier this week for press has inevitably led to teardowns of notebooks powered by the video card. As a result, Chinese video blogger Geekerwan has confirmed that it uses the GA103 GPU chip.

The first appearance of Nvidia's GA103 GPU. in an RTX 3080 Ti laptop. — Image source: Geekerwan/Tom’s Hardware

Upon opening up a laptop that comes equipped with the Nvidia GPU, the GA103 graphics processor, which is labeled as GN20-E8-A1, can be seen. There hasn’t been much information regarding the GA103 GPU that could be verified until now, but we finally have confirmation that the powerful GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will be the first card to utilize the GA103 die.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, Geekerwan’s teardown highlights how the GA103’s die size measures 496 mm^2. Comparatively, the lower-end GA104 features a die size of 392 mm^2, while the higher-end GA102 sports a 628 mm^2 die size.

It has also been confirmed that the GA103 comes with 7424 CUDA cores as opposed to the previously rumored 7680 CUDA core count. It also has been outfitted with a 256-bit memory bus. Wccftech points out that this is the widest memory bus interface that’s currently available for mobility GPUs.

The RTX 3080 Ti for laptops is the fastest mobile GPU ever made, and thus has become Nvidia’s new flagship video card for notebooks. As such, pricing for RTX 3080 Ti laptops start at $2,499. The graphics card itself is equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, representing the fastest memory speeds yet for laptops. Bandwidth speeds are therefore capable of reaching half a terabyte per second.

Nvidia stresses that the mobile RTX 3080 Ti is actually faster than a desktop Titan RTX. Granted, the latter card is more than three years old, but it still raises the question regarding the GA103 GPU’s capabilities for desktop systems. Tom’s Hardware speculates that any card based on the GA103 chip (even cutdown models) could effectively compete with some of the best PC GPUs on the market due to its technical specifications.

Meanwhile, laptops that are powered by the RTX 3080 Ti GPU will become available on February 5, 2022. Mobile machines that come with the RTX 3070 Ti will also launch on that same date, with prices starting at $1,499.