Multiple NVIDIA GeForce Ampere Max-Q and Max-P laptop parts allegedly in the works, including the GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q and GeForce RTX 3070 Max-Q
Tipster @harukaze5719 shared what appears to be a list of upcoming NVIDIA Ampere powered laptops, with GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards running alongside Intel Comet Lake H processors. The spreadsheet shows a number of alleged mobile Ampere chips, including Max-Q and Max-P editions of the GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, and GeForce RTX 3060.
The leak raises a number of critical questions. For starters, NVIDIA has yet to formally announce Ampere GPU variants for laptops. Considering the current supply shortage on the desktop side, it'll be interesting to see exactly when notebook Ampere hardware makes it to market. The other big question here is with regards to performance.
The GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 deliver phenomenal 4K gaming performance, but at the cost of drawing immense amounts of power. The GeForce RTX 3080 has a TDP of 320W, with AIB parts going to 350W and beyond. To put this into perspective, the GeForce RTX 2080 (mobile) has a TDP of just 150W, while Max-Q parts are even more frugal at 90W. GA102 is a massive GPU, requiring lots of power to run at reasonable clocks. It'll be interesting to see just how much performance NVIDIA manages to extract out of its mobile iteration.
The GeForce RTX 3070 Max-Q and GeForce RTX 3060 Max-Q, based on smaller GPUs, could presumably offer a meaningful performance improvement over notebook Turing. It remains to be seen how OEMs will configure cooling for these power-hungry Ampere GPUs.
Source(s)
