Ada Lovelace, also referred to simply as Lovelace, is a
graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...
(GPU) microarchitecture developed by
Nvidia
Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
as the successor to the
Ampere
The ampere ( , ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to 1 c ...
architecture, officially announced on September 20, 2022. It is named after the 19th century English mathematician
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-pur ...
,
one of the first computer
programmers
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming.
The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a program ...
. Nvidia announced the architecture along with the
GeForce RTX 40 series consumer GPUs and the RTX 6000 Ada Generation workstation graphics card. The Lovelace architecture is fabricated on
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...
's custom
4N process which offers increased efficiency over the previous
Samsung
Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...
8 nm and TSMC
N7 processes used by Nvidia for its previous-generation Ampere architecture.
Background
The Ada Lovelace architecture follows on from the Ampere architecture that was released in 2020. The Ada Lovelace architecture was announced by Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang
Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang ( zh, t=黃仁勳, poj=N̂g Jîn-hun, hp=Huáng Rénxūn; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the president, co-founder, and chief executive of ...
during a GTC 2022 keynote on September 20, 2022 with the architecture powering Nvidia's GPUs for gaming, workstations and datacenters.
Architectural details
Architectural improvements of the Ada Lovelace architecture include the following:
*
CUDA
In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...
Compute Capability 8.9
*
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...
4Nprocess (custom designed for Nvidia) - not to be confused with TSMC's regular N4 node
* 4th-generation Tensor Cores with FP8, FP16, bfloat16, TensorFloat-32 (TF32) and sparsity acceleration
* 3rd-generation Ray Tracing Cores, plus concurrent ray tracing and shading and compute
* Shader Execution Reordering (SER)
* Nvidia video encoder/decoder (NVENC/NVDEC) with 8K 10-bit 60FPS
AV1
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 tha ...
fixed function hardware encoding
* No
NVLink
NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications protocol, communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central ...
support
Streaming multiprocessors (SMs)
CUDA cores
128 CUDA cores are included in each SM.
RT cores
Ada Lovelace features third-generation RT cores. The RTX 4090 features 128 RT cores compared to the 84 in the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti. These 128 RT cores can provide up to 191 TFLOPS of compute with 1.49 TFLOPS per RT core.
A new stage in the ray tracing pipeline called Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is added in the Lovelace architecture which Nvidia claims provides a 2x performance improvement in ray tracing workloads.
[
]
Tensor cores
Lovelace's new fourth-generation Tensor cores enable the AI technology used in DLSS 3's frame generation techniques. Much like Ampere, each SM contains 4 Tensor cores but Lovelace contains a greater number of Tensor cores overall given its increased number of SMs.
Clock speeds
There is a significant increase in clock speeds with the Ada Lovelace architecture with the RTX 4090's base clock speed being higher than the boost clock speed of the RTX 3090 Ti.
Cache and memory subsystem
The last enabled AD102 Lovelace die features 96MB of L2 cache, a 16x increase from the 6MB in the Ampere-based GA102 die. The GPU having quick access to a high amount of L2 cache benefits complex operations like ray tracing compared to the GPU seeking data from the GDDR video memory which is slower. Relying less on accessing memory for storing important and frequently accessed data means that a narrower memory bus width can be used in tandem with a large L2 cache.
Each memory controller uses a 32-bit connection with up to 12 controllers present for a combined memory bus width of 384-bit. The Lovelace architecture can use either GDDR6
Graphics Double Data Rate 6 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (GDDR6 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth, "double data rate" interface, designed for use in graphics cards, game con ...
or GDDR6X
Graphics Double Data Rate 6 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (GDDR6 SDRAM) is a type of Synchronous dynamic random-access memory#Synchronous graphics RAM .28SGRAM.29, synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high Bandwidth ...
memory. GDDR6X memory features on the desktop GeForce RTX 40 series while the more energy-efficient GDDR6 memory is used on its corresponding mobile versions and on RTX A6000 workstation GPUs.
Power efficiency and process node
The Ada Lovelace architecture is able to use lower voltages compared to its predecessor.[ Nvidia claims a 2x performance increase for the RTX 4090 at the same 450W used by the previous generation flagship RTX 3090 Ti.
Increased power efficiency can be attributed in part to the smaller fabrication node used by the Lovelace architecture. The Ada Lovelace architecture is fabricated on ]TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...
's cutting-edge 4N process, a custom designed process node for Nvidia. The previous generation Ampere architecture used Samsung
Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...
's 8nm-based 8N process node from 2018, which was two years old by the time of Ampere's launch. The AD102 die with its 76.3 billion transistors has a transistor density of 125.5 million per mm2, a 178% increase in density from GA102's 45.1 million per mm2.
Media engine
The Lovelace architecture utilizes the new 8th generation Nvidia NVENC
NVENC (short for Nvidia Encoder) is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs Data compression, video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the Central processing unit, CPU to a dedicated part of the Graphics processing uni ...
video encoder and the 7th generation NVDEC video decoder introduced by Ampere returns.
NVENC AV1
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 tha ...
hardware encoding with support for up to 8K resolution at 60FPS in 10-bit color is added, enabling higher video fidelity at lower bit rates compared to the H.264 and H.265 codecs. Nvidia claims that its NVENC AV1 encoder featured in the Lovelace architecture is 40% more efficient than the H.264 encoder in the Ampere architecture.
The Lovelace architecture received criticism for not supporting the DisplayPort 2.0 connection that supports higher display data bandwidth and instead uses the older DisplayPort 1.4a which is limited to a peak bandwidth of 32 Gbit/s. As a result, Lovelace GPUs would be limited by DisplayPort 1.4a's supported refresh rates despite the GPU's performance being able to reach higher frame rates. Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
's Arc GPUs that also released in October 2022 included DisplayPort 2.0. AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...
's competing RDNA 3
RDNA 3 is a GPU microarchitecture designed by AMD, released with the Radeon RX 7000 series on December 13, 2022. Alongside powering the RX 7000 series, RDNA 3 is also featured in the SoCs designed by AMD for the Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion ...
architecture released just two months after Lovelace included DisplayPort 2.1.
Ada Lovelace dies
Ada Lovelace-based products
Consumer
Desktop
* GeForce 40 series
The GeForce RTX 40 series is a family of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs) developed by Nvidia as part of its GeForce line of Graphics card, graphics cards, succeeding the GeForce RTX 30 series. The series was announced on September 2 ...
** GeForce RTX 4060 (AD107)
** GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (AD106)
** GeForce RTX 4070 (AD104)
** GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER (AD104)
** GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (AD104)
** GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (AD103)
** GeForce RTX 4080 (AD103)
** GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER (AD103)
** GeForce RTX 4090 D (AD102)
** GeForce RTX 4090 (AD102)
Mobile
* GeForce 40 series
The GeForce RTX 40 series is a family of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs) developed by Nvidia as part of its GeForce line of Graphics card, graphics cards, succeeding the GeForce RTX 30 series. The series was announced on September 2 ...
** GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop (AD107)
** GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop (AD107)
** GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop (AD106)
** GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop (AD104)
** GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop (AD103)
Professional
Desktop workstation
* Nvidia Workstation GPUs (formerly Quadro
Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine l ...
)
** Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation (AD107)
** Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation (AD104)
** Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation (AD104)
** Nvidia RTX 4500 Ada Generation (AD104)
** Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation (AD102)
** Nvidia RTX 5880 Ada Generation (AD102)
** Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation (AD102)
Mobile workstation
* Nvidia Workstation GPUs (formerly Quadro
Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine l ...
)
** Nvidia RTX 500 Ada Generation Laptop (AD107)
** Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop (AD107)
** Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop (AD107)
** Nvidia RTX 3000 Ada Generation Laptop (AD106)
** Nvidia RTX 3500 Ada Generation Laptop (AD104)
** Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop (AD104)
** Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation Laptop (AD103)
Datacenter
* Nvidia Data Center GPUs (formerly Tesla)
** Nvidia L4 (AD104)
** Nvidia L40 (AD102)
** Nvidia L40G (AD102)
** Nvidia L40CNX (AD102)
See also
* List of eponyms of Nvidia GPU microarchitectures
References
External links
NVIDIA ADA GPU ARCHITECTURE whitepaper
{{Nvidia
Computer-related introductions in 2022
Nvidia microarchitectures
Nvidia Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace