NVIDIA forced to make most Ampere GPUs on Samsung 8nm this year?

TweakTown made a summary of fresh NVIDIA rumors spread by YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead. As usual, take this with a grain of salt as there's no way to verify the accuracy.

There are some juicy bits in here, which build on previous news that NVIDIA underestimated the impact of AMD switching to TSMC and was allegedly unable to secure enough 7nm capacity. The GeForce RTX 3080 is reportedly made on Samsung's 8nm process, which has some drawbacks of course. The 8nm GeForce RTX 3080 is reportedly 15-25% faster than RTX 2080 Ti, while the 7nm GeForce RTX 3090 (which uses the same GA102 GPU) is said to be 45-60 percent faster than the RTX 2080 Ti.

The 8nm Samsung situation isn't ideal for NVIDIA and was reportedly not the company's first choice. The 8nm based cards for consumers will be the first out of the gate, with the 7nm GeForce RTX 3090 reportedly planned for Q1 2021. It's said that Samsung's 8nm node will be used for at least three NVIDIA Ampere GPUs, so that's definitely a pretty big win for Samsung's foundry business. Almost all consumer Ampere-based GPU that will ship before 2021 are reportedly made by Samsung.

The YouTube channel claims the Quadro 6000 cards will ship soon, these will have a fully unlocked GA102 GPU with 48GB memory. The top gaming cards will reportedly have up to 24GB of memory. The GeForce RTX 3090 may have 20GB GDDR6X.

As Samsung's 8nm node is a fallback plan, NVIDIA reportedly disabled a large number of SMs to reduce the massive power draw of Ampere. Months ago it was speculated that Ampere could be a very power hungry and hot card and this could be the reason.

Moore's Law is Dead also heard there's a slim chance that NVIDIA may put a software lock on the memory of its GeForce RTX 3080 to have sort of a "trump card" if they need more performance to beat AMD's Big Navi. The channel speaks about locking the card to 10GB/320-bit versus 12GB/384-bit memory bus, which seems a bit moronic to be honest. AMD did something similar with the Radeon RX 5600 XT, so it can't be ruled out completely, but it does seem like a waste to use such a severe software lock.

Ampere is ready to be revealed now but availability may not occur until early October. NVIDIA is reportedly not concerned about AMD beating the top Ampere cards, but they're concerned that AMD may beat the 8nm GeForce RTX 3080. Therefore, final specifications remain reserved and may still change at the last moment.

A lot of rumors to digest here, I guess we'll find out in the coming weeks what's true.