Ampere is the codename for 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 In electronics, computer science and computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as μarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular ...

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 both the Volta and

Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical compute ...

architectures. It was officially announced on May 14, 2020, and is named after French mathematician and physicist

André-Marie Ampère André-Marie Ampère (, ; ; 20 January 177510 June 1836) was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as ''electrodynamics''. He is also the inventor of ...

. Nvidia announced the Ampere architecture

GeForce 30 series The GeForce RTX 30 series is a suite of graphics processing units (GPUs) developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce RTX 20 series. The GeForce RTX 30 series is based on the Ampere architecture, which features Nvidia's second-generation ray t ...

consumer GPUs at a GeForce Special Event on September 1, 2020. Nvidia announced the A100 80 GB GPU at SC20 on November 16, 2020. Mobile RTX graphics cards and the RTX 3060 based on the Ampere architecture were revealed on January 12, 2021. Nvidia announced Ampere's successor,

Hopper Hopper or hoppers may refer to: Places * Hopper, Illinois * Hopper, West Virginia * Hopper, a mountain and valley in the Hunza–Nagar District of Pakistan * Hopper (crater), a crater on Mercury People * Hopper (surname) Insects * Hopper, the ...

, at GTC 2022, and "Ampere Next Next" ( Blackwell) for a 2024 release at GPU Technology Conference 2021.

Details

Architectural improvements of the Ampere 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 8.0 for A100 and 8.6 for the GeForce 30 series *

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' ...

7 nm In semiconductor manufacturing, the "7 nm" process is a term for the MOSFET technology node following the "10 nm" node, defined by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), which was preceded by the International Technology Road ...

FinFET A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the chann ...

process for A100 * Custom version of

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 8 nm process (8N) for the GeForce 30 series * Third-generation Tensor Cores with FP16,

bfloat16 The bfloat16 (brain floating point) floating-point format is a computer number format occupying 16 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. This format is a shortened (16-bi ...

, TensorFloat-32 (TF32) and FP64 support and sparsity acceleration. The individual Tensor cores have with 256 FP16 FMA operations per clock 4x processing power (GA100 only, 2x on GA10x) compared to previous Tensor Core generations; the Tensor Core Count is reduced to one per SM. * Second-generation ray tracing cores; concurrent ray tracing, shading, and compute for the GeForce 30 series * High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) on A100 40 GB & A100 80 GB *

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 for GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3070 Ti * Double FP32 cores per SM on GA10x GPUs * NVLink 3.0 with a 50 Gbit/s per pair throughput *

PCI Express 4.0 PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as PCI, PC ...

with

SR-IOV In virtualization, single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) is a specification that allows the isolation of PCI Express resources for manageability and performance reasons. Details A single physical PCI Express bus can be shared in a virt ...

support (SR-IOV is reserved only for A100) * Multi-instance GPU (MIG) virtualization and GPU partitioning feature in A100 supporting up to seven instances *

PureVideo PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occupie ...

feature set K hardware video decoding with

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 decoding for the GeForce 30 series and feature set J for A100 * 5 NVDEC for A100 * Adds new hardware-based 5-core

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

decode (NVJPG) with YUV420, YUV422, YUV444, YUV400, RGBA. Should not be confused with Nvidia NVJPEG (GPU-accelerated

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

for JPEG encoding/decoding)

Chips

* GA100 * GA102 * GA103 * GA104 * GA106 * GA107 * GA10B Comparison of Compute Capability: GP100 vs GV100 vs GA100 Comparison of Precision Support Matrix Legend: * FPnn: floating point with nn bits * INTn: integer with n bits * INT1: binary * TF32: TensorFloat32 * BF16: bfloat16 Comparison of Decode Performance

Ampere dies

A100 accelerator and DGX A100

The Ampere-based A100 accelerator was announced and released on May 14, 2020. The A100 features 19.5 teraflops of FP32 performance, 6912 FP32/INT32 CUDA cores, 3456 FP64 CUDA cores, 40 GB of graphics memory, and 1.6 TB/s of graphics memory bandwidth. The A100 accelerator was initially available only in the 3rd generation of DGX server, including 8 A100s. Also included in the DGX A100 is 15 TB of

PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

gen 4

NVMe NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The in ...

storage, two 64-core AMD

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

7742 CPUs, 1 TB of RAM, and

Mellanox Mellanox Technologies Ltd. () was an Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon for markets including high ...

-powered HDR InfiniBand interconnect. The initial price for the DGX A100 was $199,000.

Products using Ampere

* GeForce MX series ** GeForce MX570 (mobile) (GA107) *

GeForce 20 series The GeForce RTX 20 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Serving as the successor to the GeForce 10 series, the line started shipping on September 20, 2018, and after several editions, on July 2, 2019, the GeForc ...

** GeForce RTX 2050 (mobile) (GA107) *

** GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU (GA107) ** GeForce RTX 3050 (GA106 or GA107) ** GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU (GA107) ** GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU (GA106) ** GeForce RTX 3060 (GA106 or GA104) ** GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (GA104 or GA103) ** GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU (GA104) ** GeForce RTX 3070 (GA104) ** GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU (GA104) ** GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (GA104 or GA102) ** GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU (GA104) ** GeForce RTX 3080 (GA102) ** GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB (GA102) ** GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU (GA103) ** GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (GA102) ** GeForce RTX 3090 (GA102) ** GeForce RTX 3090 Ti (GA102) * 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 ...

) ** RTX A1000 (mobile) (GA107) ** RTX A2000 (mobile) (GA106) ** RTX A2000 (GA106) ** RTX A3000 (mobile) (GA104) ** RTX A4000 (mobile) (GA104) ** RTX A4000 (GA104) ** RTX A5000 (mobile) (GA104) ** RTX A5500 (mobile) (GA103) ** RTX A4500 (GA102) ** RTX A5000 (GA102) ** RTX A5500 (GA102) ** RTX A6000 (GA102) ** A800 Active * Nvidia Data Center GPUs (formerly

Tesla Tesla most commonly refers to: * Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), a Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor * Tesla, Inc., an American electric vehicle and clean energy company, formerly Tesla Motors, Inc. * Tesla (unit) (symbol: T), the SI-d ...

) ** Nvidia A2 (GA107) ** Nvidia A10 (GA102) ** Nvidia A16 (4 × GA107) ** Nvidia A30 (GA100) ** Nvidia A40 (GA102) ** Nvidia A100 (GA100) ** Nvidia A100 80 GB (GA100) ** Nvidia A100X ** NVIDIA A30X * Tegra SoCs ** AGX Orin (GA10B) ** Orin NX (GA10B) ** Orin Nano (GA10B) ** T239 (

Nintendo Switch 2 The is a hybrid video game console developed by Nintendo, released in most regions on June5, 2025. Like the original Nintendo Switch, Switch, it can be used as a Handheld game console, handheld, as a Tablet computer, tablet, or connected via ...

)

References

External links

Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPU Architecture whitepaper

Nvidia Ampere GA102 GPU Architecture whitepaper

Nvidia Ampere Architecture

Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPU

Nvidia Ampere Architecture In-Depth
{{Nvidia Nvidia microarchitectures Nvidia Ampere