NVIDIA Quadro T2000 Max-Q vs NVIDIA RTX A4000 Laptop GPU

The Nvidia Quadro T2000 with Max-Q Design is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer desktop GTX 1650 Ti therefore currently between a mobile GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. Compared to the normal Quadro T2000, the Max-Q variants are clocked lower and work in a more efficient state. Currently, we know of two variants with different clock speeds and power consumptions (35 and 40 W).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

The performance in professional apps should be clearly lower than a normal (Max-P) Quadro T2000 due to the lower clock speeds, but still ahead the slower Quadro T1000 due to the higher shader count. Compared to consumer cards, the mobile GTX 1650 should be still slower.

Thanks to the relative low power consumption of the Quadro T2000 Max-Q, the GPU is suited for thin and light laptops. The used TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.

The NVIDIA RTX A4000 Laptop GPU or A4000 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and similar to the consumer GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU. It offers the same 5.120 graphics cores, 40 RT cores, 160 Tensor cores and 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 256 Bit memory bus. It supports PCIe 4.0 and will be available in different variants from 80 - 140 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.

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 3070 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 A4000 should be clearly faster than the old Quadro RTX 4000 and 4000 Max-Q. The desktop variant of the A4000 however, is a lot faster.

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 A4000 only uses 5,120 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).