NVIDIA Unveils RTX A5500 For Desktop Creators And A Barrage Of Professional Laptop GPUs
NVIDIA kicked off its GTC 2022 event this week with a flurry of announcements, highlighted by its Hopper GPU architecture and 144-core Grace CPU Superchip. It was an absolute blitz, in terms of everything unveiled so far. Adding to the pile, NVIDIA is expanding its lineup of workstation GPUs with the RTX A5500 in desktop and mobile form, along with a handful of other laptop GPUs for professionals.
Starting with the sole desktop addition, the RTX A5500 is essentially a professional version of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, though it's not a carbon copy across the board. It's based on the same Ampere GPU with 80 streaming multiprocessors, 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores, and 80 RT cores. The card delivers up to 31.4 TFLOPs of single-precision performance, same as the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
There's no mention of clock speeds, though where the two cards begin to separate is in the memory arrangement. The RTX A5500 sports 24GB of GDDR6 (16Gbps) with error correction code (ECC). This is linked to a 384-bit bus to deliver 768 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, meanwhile, features 12GB of GDDR6X (19Gbps) tied to the same bus width, to deliver 912.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
This is a dual-slot card with four DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and a rated 230W max power consumption. While not mentioned outright, it looks like NVIDIA intends for the RTX A5500 to replace the RTX 5000.
Source: NVIDIA
The RTX A5500 is also being added to NVIDIA's professional laptop GPU lineup, as are five other SKUs. In laptop form, the RTX A5500 wields 58 SMs, 7,424 CUDA cores, 232 Tensor cores, and 58 RT cores. It also sports 16GB of GDDR6 (16Gbps) memory delivering up to 512GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Other additions include the RTX A4500 (16GB, 5,888 CUDA cores), A3000 (12GB, 4,096 CUDA cores), A2000 (8GB, 2,560 CUDA cores), A1000 (4GB, 2,048 CUDA cores), and A500 (4GB, 2,048 CUDA cores). in essence, creators are getting memory bumps and expanded options with these additions.
"The new NVIDIA RTX A500, RTX A1000, RTX A2000 8GB, RTX A3000 12GB, RTX A4500 and RTX A5500 laptop GPUs expand access to AI and ray-tracing technology, delivering breakthrough performance no matter where you work. The laptops include the latest RTX and Max-Q technology, giving professionals the ability to take their workflows to the next level," NVIDIA says.
The RTX A5500 in desktop form is available immediately through NVIDIA's channel partners, and the laptop additions will arrive this spring.
