Nvidia GPU makers are reportedly clearing stock to prepare for the RTX 30 series – Alleged specs listed

With Nvidia’s GTC Keynote coming on May 14th, now is the perfect time to start rumour-mongering about Nvidia’s next generation of graphics hardware. Many are expecting Nvidia to reveal its rumoured Ampere series of gaming graphics cards next month, even though Nvidia GTC Keynote announcement doesn’t even mention gaming.

The conversation has gotten silly, with many sites sharing the image below from China Times which allegedly reveal the specifications of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series of Ampere graphics cards. Many of these sites have failed to cite their source, China Times, and instead link to a (now deleted) Tweet from @chiakokhua, a retired engineer on Twitter. Note that this Tweet was deleted because @chiakokhua now believes that the specifications from China Times are false. 

An important thing to note about China Times’ article is that it isn’t about the specifications of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series of graphics cards. They just use an image which details rumoured specifications. The article itself is about Nvidia’s Add-in board partners, such as ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI have started to reduce their shipments of RTX 20 series graphics cards to prepare for the release of next-generation graphics hardware in the second half of 2020. 

China Times expects Nvidia to release RTX 30 series graphics cards in late Q3 of 2020, with further hardware releases in Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. Another thing to add is that the specifications listed by China times are all presented with the mathematical symbol for less than (
Another thing that China Times reports is that Nvidia will build its RTX 3080 Ti using a GPU core called GA100, even though most of Nvidia’s x080 Ti series graphics cards use Gx102 series core designs. For example, Nvidia’s GP100 (Pascal) and GV100 (Volta) chip designs were never used to create gaming graphics cards. GA100 is likely to form the basis of a future Tesla and Quadro series graphics cards, not an RTX 3080 Ti. 

The specifications listed below tell us nothing. Nvidia’s Ampere gaming flagship is listed with GDDR6 memory, 7nm lithography and less than 8192 CUDA cores. That’s not exactly revolutionary information, and the lack of specific details here is more than enough to make these specifications seem dubious at best.