NVIDIA Snaps Suspenders, Announces RTX A6000 and A40 Video Cards

This week, NVIDIA officially snapped their suspenders announcing the next in their series of GPUs sporting the latest graphics-crackin’ Ampere microarchitecture – the RTX A6000 Pro Viz GPU and the A40 Data Center GPU.

They follow on the mainstream GPU availability of the unexpected, highly demanded, hard to come by RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 and, later this month, RTX 3070.

NVIDIA Ampere GPU Specs

If you love the 1st-gen RTX GPUs, the next-gen is going to make you all sorts of giddy. The Ampere cards build on the Quadro RTX capabilities and introduce the 3rd-Generation of Tensor Cores tech to speed up AI operations, 2nd-Generation RT Cores to speed up ray tracing, and 3rd-generation NVLink to speed up multiple GPU scaling.

Though new performance data is coming out daily, here’s a mish-mash of specs that are, strangely enough, spread across various sites, collected here for your convenience.

Ampere GPU Comparison

	A40	A6000	RTX 3070	RTX 3080	RTX 3090
GPU	GA102	GA102	GA104	GA102	GA102
VRAM	48Gb	48Gb	8Gb	10Gb	24Gb
Memory Clock	14.5Gb GDDR6	16Gb GDDR6	16Gb GDDR6	19Gb GDDR6	19.5Gb GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	696 Gbps	768 Gbps	448 Gbps	760 Gbps	936 Gbps
Memory Interface Width	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit	320-bit	384-bit
CUDA Cores	10752	10752	5888	8704	10496
Tensor Cores (3rd gen)	336	336	384	576	576
RT Cores (2nd gen)	84	84	46	68	82
Tensor Performance	?	?	82 TFlops	119 TFlops	143 TFlops
NVLinks Support	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
List Price	TBA	TBA	$499	$699	$1499

You’ll notice the A6000 and A40 sit roughly between the Geforce 30 Series RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 but with gains in VRAM akin to the Turing-era Quadro RTX 8000 but more than doubling its CUDA core count. In fact, it may be more helpful to compare it to the high-end Turing GPU, so let’s do that.

RTX GPU Comparison

	A40	RTX A6000	RTX 8000
GPU	GA102	GA102	TU102
Processor Size	8nm	8nm	12nm
VRAM	48Gb	48Gb	48Gb
Memory Clock	14.5Gb GDDR6	16Gb GDDR6	14Gb GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	696 Gbps	768 Gbps	672 Gbps
Memory Interface Width	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit
CUDA Cores	10752	10752	4608
Tensor Cores	336	336	576
RT Cores	84	84	72
Tensor Performance	?	?	130.5 TFlops
NVLinks Support	Yes	Yes	Yes
List Price	TBA	TBA	$10000

NVIDIA Ampere GPU Design

Perhaps just as sexy as all these numbers is the new GPU design. With the sleek two-tone black/gold style, it is now a certifiable travesty to hide these GPUs inside a dust-ridden tower or rack. 

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