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.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, Ampere GPU — NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang (without leather jacket) – Fact check: TRUE.

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.

CUDA Cores	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	14.5 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	19 GB GDDR6	19.5 GB 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
VRAM	48GB	48GB	8GB	10GB	24GB
Tensor Performance	?	?	82 TFLOPS	119 TFLOPS	143 TFLOPS
NVLinks Support	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
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.

CUDA Cores	RTX GPU Comparison
	A40	RTX A6000	RTX 8000
GPU	GA102	GA102	TU102
Processor Sizr	8 nm	8 nm	12 nm
VRAM	48GB	48GB	48GB
Memory Clock	14.5 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	14 GB 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 an certifiable travesty to hide these GPUs inside a dust-ridden tower or rack. Just look at these beauties:

The NVIDIA RTX A6000 – “Don’t lock me up in ze case!”

The NVIDIA A40 – “More Bling than Sting dancin’ the Highland fling.”

These Ampere GPUs are a might powerful, son!

NVIDIA Ampere GPU Performance

As mentioned, new Ampere performance data is showing up daily. Techgage has published quite a few articles on the RTX 30 series already with a look at RTX 3080 performance and RTX 3090 performance. Though RTX A6000 data is yet to hit, NVIDIA did reveal some performance insight. If you use KeyShot with SOLIDWORKS, Fusion 360, PTC Creo or other modeling software, early benchmarks with the RTX A6000 are showing up to a 275% performance increase over the RTX 6000. Here’s what others are saying about the new Ampere card.

The ability to double or triple the resolution and vastly accelerate our real-time visualization of massive, complex building models in cityscapes with the NVIDIA RTX A6000 is super impressive,”
Paul Renner, visualization manager at KPF

The new NVIDIA RTX A6000 lets us completely redefine what’s possible with real-time ray tracing and machine learning.”
Darren Hendler, director of the digital human group at Digital Domain

The new NVIDIA RTX A6000 has exceeded our expectations and shown performance gains of over 2x with ray-traced exterior scenes. It’s quite impressive.”
Guillaume Shan, Computer Graphics and Visualization Solutions at Groupe Renault

Be on the lookout for RTX A6000 availability mid-December and to start showing up in workstations from Lenovo, Dell, HP, and others early next year. If you’re interested in the technical aspects of the new Ampere architecture, hit the NVIDIA Ampere overview and settle in with some biscuits and cup o’ gravy to read over the riveting whitepaper at the bottom.

One more for good measure…