There have been a fair number of rumours, leaks and 'photos' of Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series products going around recently. It is understandable that the rate of leaks will increase as a product nears launch and distribution, and by all accounts the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards are due to be unveiled shortly.
Nvidia has been teasing on social media with its #UltimateCountdown which will end with a special event, to be hosted by CEO Jensen Huang at 9am PT (5pm UK time) on Tuesday, 1st Sept. It is pretty certain that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series products will be unwrapped on this day, with product launches by Nvidia and partners rolling out about a week later.
Today a significant next gen Nvidia GeForce leak came via an unexpected source; memory specialists Micron (PDF), as spotted by VideoCardz. That linked Acrobat document is an official Micron Tech Brief for partners outlining the choices open for devices used for various purposes. Micron sells memory for all sorts of applications; from automotive, networking appliances, games consoles, PC gaming, pro graphics, to HPC.
In the tech brief Micron discusses lets a sizeable cat out of the bag with the following paragraph:
"In Summer of 2020, Micron announced the next evolution of Ultra-Bandwidth Solutions in GDDR6X. Working closely with NVIDIA on their Ampere generation of graphics cards, Micron's 8Gb GDDR6X will deliver up to 21Gb/s (data rate per pin) in 2020. At 21Gb/s, a graphic card with 12pcs of GDDR6X will be able to break the 1TB/s of system bandwidth barrier! Micron’s roadmap also highlights the potential for a 16Gb GDDR6X in 2021 with the ability to reach up to 24Gb/s. GDDR6X is powered by a revolutionary new PAM4 modulation technology for Ultra-Bandwidth Solutions. PAM4 has the potential to drive even more improvements in data rate."
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090
Additionally, Micron has shared a 'Categories of Ultra-Bandwidth Memory' table which shows us what to expect with the arrival of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. I've truncated the table, to centre on the headlining specs of the RTX 3090, as below.
The above confirms a number of important things. For example, we now know the flagship GeForce RTX 30 series card will be the 'RTX 3090', and it will come packing 12GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit interface. As per the highlighted quoted paragraph, above, this memory provides bandwidth of up to 1TB/s.
