The graphics card market is booming. AMD will announce its new Radeon 6000 series cards on October 28, 2020. Intel, for its part, continues to concoct its Iris Xe series coupled with its Tiger Lake processors. Nvidia is not idle for its part and is working on 4 GeForce RTX 30 series models.
What cards is Nvidia working on?
Nvidia is currently working on 4 models: The GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q, the GeForce RTX 3070 Max-Q, the GeForce RTX 3060 Max-Q and the GeForce RTX 3060 Max-P . These are models for laptops optimized by Ampere. NVIDIA has apparently already transmitted the specifications to its partners. If there will be no change, an announcement will be made in January 2021.
The cards will be based on 3 models: the RTX 3080, the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3060. There will therefore be 3 versions in Max-Q and one in Max-P. Q for quality, Max-Q cards do not consume much and heat up less. They have a TDP of around 90 Watts . There will be another version for the RTX 3060 in Max-P. P for performance, this version offers more performance but consumes a little more electricity. As a reminder, the Max-P versions can have a TDP of 350 Watts.
Specifications of these GeForce cards
These Notebook cards use the same GPU versions as those for desktop PCs. The RTX 3080 card is an exception and has a GA104 and not a GA102. These GPUs are produced by Samsung with an 8nm manufacturing . They do not yet use the 7 nanometer manufacturing process, like that used by TSMC.
The RTX 3060 Max-Q and Max-P card is rumored to feature GDDR6 memory and not GDDR6X. This board would use a GA104 mini or a GA106. These graphics cards would initially equip Laptops equipped with IntelCore 10th generation CPUs (Comet-Lake) before equipping PCs equipped with Intel's 8-core, 16-thread Tiger Lake-H processors. So :
- The RTX 3080 Max-Q will accompany the Comet-Lake (CML) core i9-10980HK laptop PC equipped with 64 GB of RAM and 2 SSD storage units of 1 TB each (2 x 1 TB). The operating system used would be Windows 10 Pro;
- The RTX 3070 Max-Q will be installed on a Comet-Lake core i9-10870H laptop PC equipped with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD drive. The PC will run Windows 10 Pro. Another version running Windows 10 Home, equipped with this RTX 3070 Max-Q card will also be available. This laptop will be equipped with a core i9-10870H processor, 16 GB of memory and a 512 GB SSD.
- The RTX 3060 Max-P will be installed on a Comet-Lake core i9-10870H laptop PC equipped with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD drive. The operating system of the PC would be Windows 10 Pro.
Intel would produce Tiger Lake laptops that would host GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards. The Company would also equip some of these latest generation PCs with its Iris Xe . We will see how the competition behaves, especially with the upcoming arrival of the AMD Radeon 6000 series based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
