Rumor | NVIDIA Lovelace to feature in next gen Nintendo Switch, Lovelace RTX 40 with 2.2 GHz+ boost being prepped to outship AMD RDNA 3 at a lesser price irrespective of performance

Recently, we've come across information that NVIDIA's upcoming Hopper architecture will be taping out soon for a mid-2022 launch. While Hopper is meant to cater to datacenter and AI workflows, Ada Lovelace is widely believed to be the architecture for NVIDIA's upcoming gaming GPUs. Now, new information is coming out that further confirms what we've been hearing so far. 

According to @greymon55 on Twitter, Lovelace is indeed the next gaming card from NVIDIA and has apparently been finalized with no imminent change in plans. Additionally, Lovelace will be based on TSMC's 5 nm fabrication process, but the leaker isn't fully sure whether it's N5 or N5P. @greymon55 also confirmed that AMD has begun early 5 nm package validation for both Zen 4 and RDNA 3, which would imply a release window of about eight to 15 months from now.

Known NVIDIA leaker @kopite7kimi, on the other hand, had earlier indicated that NVIDIA's use of Lovelace AD102 for RTX 40 series GPUs would depend on what AMD's plans are, particularly with RDNA 3. If current rumors are anything to go by, RDNA 3 will be based on a multi-chip module (MCM) design. Therefore, if AD102 falls behind RDNA 3, NVIDIA may introduce Hopper GH202 for the consumer market in the RTX 40 series.

The other juicy bit of information comes via Tom from the YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead. According to Tom, Lovelace may not only be restricted to desktops and laptops alone but also feature in the upcoming Nintendo Switch and in self-driving cars under the Orin SoC family. In fact, we've previously reported on Nintendo's upcoming "Super Switch" or "Switch 2" or even the "Switch Pro" possibly featuring an Orin-like SoC, which should be way more powerful than the current NVIDIA Tegra X1+ T214 "Mariko" offering.

If Nintendo indeed has plans on using a Lovelace-based Orin SoC in the upcoming Switch successor, we will probably not see the device till late 2022. Given that the Ampere lineup launched in late 2020 and that NVIDIA would want to maintain the standard 2-year release cadence, Lovelace GPUs, and consequently the Switch successor, can only be expected sometime in late 2022. 

So far, rumored specifications for the flagship AD102 Lovelace GPU point to 144 streaming multiprocessors (82 SMs in the RTX 3090) with 18,432 CUDA cores (10,496 CUDA cores in the RTX 3090). That's a lot of cores by any measure and will obviously be cut-down for the rest of the product stack. A clock speed of above 2.2 GHz is also being speculated while the memory would be an improved version of GDDR6X.

The more important thing to note here is that, according to Tom, NVIDIA is planning to "outship Radeon into oblivion", which indicates that even if AMD RDNA 3 is able to match or beat Hopper/Lovelace in terms of performance, NVIDIA is apparently planning to counter it by increasing production and possibly reducing prices in order to make them more enticing than the competition.

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