NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA RTX A3000 Laptop GPU or A3000 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and offers a similar performance to the consumer GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU. However, it offers 256 more CUDA cores (4,096 versus 3,840) and is based on the bigger GA104 chip. The A3000 also supports PCIe 4.0 and integrates 32 RT-cores and 128 Tensor cores of the Ampere generation. It is available in different variants from 60 - 130 Watt (TGP) with different clock speeds (and performance). The GPU supports eDP 1.4b to connect the internal monitor and DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 for external connections.

In 2022 Nvidia released a slightly improved version of the RTX A3000 with more and faster graphics memory. The original 6 GB with 11 Gbits has been doubled to 12 GB GDDR6 clocked at 14 Gbits.

There is no more Max-Q variant (formerly used for the low power variants) but every OEM can choose to implement Max-Q technologies (Dynamic Boost, WhisperMode).

The raw performance should be similar to the GeForce RTX 3060 for laptops at the same TGP level. Both GPUs depend heavily on good cooling and a high TGP for good performance. At a similar power consumption level the RTX A3000 should be clearly faster than the old Quadro RTX 3000 and 3000 Max-Q. 

The GA104 chip offers 6,144 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 3,072 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The A3000 only uses 4,096 of the 6,144 CUDA cores. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA104 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).