Ampere is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to both the Volta and Turing architectures. It was officially announced on May 14, 2020, and is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère.
Nvidia announced the Ampere architecture GeForce 30 series 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, 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 Compute Capability 8.0 for A100 and 8.6 for the GeForce 30 series TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process for A100 Custom version of Samsung's 8 nm process (8N) for the GeForce 30 series Third-generation Tensor Cores with FP16, bfloat16, 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 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 with SR-IOV support (SR-IOV is reserved only for A100) Multi-instance GPU (MIG) virtualization and spatial GPU partitioning feature in A100 supporting up to seven instances PureVideo feature set K hardware video decoding with AV1 hardware decoding for the GeForce 30 series and feature set J for A100 5 NVDEC for A100 Adds new hardware-based 5-core JPEG decode (NVJPG) with YUV420, YUV422, YUV444, YUV400, RGBA. Should not be confused with Nvidia NVJPEG (GPU-accelerated library for JPEG encoding/decoding)
Chips GA100 GA102 GA103 GA104 GA106 GA107 GA10B
Comparison of Compute Capability: GP100 vs GV100 vs GA100 GPU featuresNvidia Tesla P100Nvidia Tesla V100Nvidia A100GPU codenameGP100GV100GA100GPU architecturePascalVoltaAmpereCompute capability6.07.08.0Threads / warp323232Max warps / SM646464Max threads / SM204820482048Max thread blocks / SM323232Max 32-bit registers / SM655366553665536Max registers / block655366553665536Max registers / thread255255255Max thread block size102410241024FP32 cores / SM646464 Ratio of SM registers to FP32 cores102410241024Shared Memory Size / SM64 KBConfigurable up to 96 KBConfigurable up to 164 KB
Comparison of Precision Support Matrix Supported CUDA Core Precisions Supported Tensor Core Precisions FP16FP32FP64INT1INT4INT8TF32BF16FP16FP32FP64INT1INT4INT8TF32BF16 Nvidia Tesla P4 Nvidia P100 Nvidia Volta Nvidia Turing Nvidia A100 Legend: FPnn: floating point with nn bits INTn: integer with n bits INT1: binary TF32: TensorFloat32 BF16: bfloat16
Comparison of Decode Performance Concurrent streamsH.264 decode (1080p30)H.265 (HEVC) decode (1080p30)VP9 decode (1080p30)V100162222A10075157108
Ampere dies Die GA100 GA102 GA103 GA104 GA106 GA107 GA10B GA10F Die size 826mm2 628mm2 496mm2 392mm2 276mm2 200mm2 448mm2 ? Transistors 54.2B 28.3B 22B 17.4B 12B 8.7B 21B ? Transistor density 65.6 MTr/mm2 45.1 MTr/mm2 44.4 MTr/mm2 44.4 MTr/mm2 43.5 MTr/mm2 43.5 MTr/mm2 46.9 MTr/mm2 ? Graphics processing clusters 8 7 6 6 3 2 2 1 Streaming multiprocessors 128 84 60 48 30 20 16 12 CUDA cores 8192 10752 7680 6144 3840 2560 2048 1536 Texture mapping units 512 336 240 192 120 80 64 48 Render output units 192 112 96 96 48 32 32 16 Tensor cores 512 336 240 192 120 80 64 48 RT cores N/A 84 60 48 30 20 8 12 L1 cache 24MB 10.5MB 7.5MB 6MB 3MB 2.5MB 3MB 1.5MB 192KBper SM 128KB per SM 192KBper SM 128KBper SM L2 cache 40MB 6MB 4MB 4MB 3MB 2MB 4MB 1MB
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 gen 4 NVMe storage, two 64-core AMD Rome 7742 CPUs, 1 TB of RAM, and Mellanox-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 GeForce RTX 2050 (mobile) (GA107) GeForce 30 series 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) 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) 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, GA10F)
+ Products using Ampere (per Chip) Type GA10B GA107 GA106 GA104 GA103 GA102 GA100 GeForce MX series GeForce MX570 (mobile) GeForce 20 series GeForce RTX 2050 (mobile) GeForce 30 series GeForce RTX 3050 LaptopGeForce RTX 3050GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GeForce RTX 3050GeForce RTX 3060 LaptopGeForce RTX 3060 GeForce RTX 3060GeForce RTX 3060 TiGeForce RTX 3070 LaptopGeForce RTX 3070GeForce RTX 3070 Ti LaptopGeForce RTX 3070 TiGeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GeForce RTX 3060 TiGeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GeForce RTX 3070 TiGeForce RTX 3080GeForce RTX 3080 TiGeForce RTX 3090GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Nvidia Workstation GPUs RTX A1000 (mobile) RTX A2000 (mobile) RTX A2000 RTX A3000 (mobile)RTX A4000 (mobile)RTX A4000RTX A5000 (mobile) RTX A5500 (mobile) RTX A4500RTX A5000RTX A5500RTX A6000 Nvidia Data Center GPUs Nvidia A2Nvidia A16 Nvidia A10Nvidia A40 Nvidia A30Nvidia A100 Tegra SoCs AGX OrinOrin NXOrin Nano
See also List of eponyms of Nvidia GPU microarchitectures List of Nvidia graphics processing units Nvidia NVENC Nvidia NVDEC
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