Ampere (microarchitecture)
GPU microarchitecture designed by NVIDIA
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
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.
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