NVIDIA RTX A1000 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA T1000 vs NVIDIA T550 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA RTX A1000 Laptop GPU or A1000 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA107 Ampere chip and offers a slightly slower performance than the consumer GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU. It offers 2,048 CUDA cores, 16 Raytracing and 64 Tensor cores paired with a 128 Bit memory bus.  It is available in different variants from 35 - 95 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 sloghtly slower than GeForce RTX 3050 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 A1000 should be clearly faster than the old Quadro T1200. 

The GA107 chip offers 2.560 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,280 INT32 ALUs). With Ampere all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. However, RTX A1000 can only use 2048 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 GA107 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). Depending on the TGP, the A1200 can also be used in thin and light laptops (with 35 Watt TGP e.g.).

The Nvidia T550 Laptop GPU (formerly known as Quadro T550 Mobile) for laptops is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer GeForce MX550 and features the same 1024 cores and a 64 Bit memory bus. The card offers 4 GB GDDR6 with a maximum bandwidth of 112 GB/s and no dedicated display outputs (iGPU display outputs used via Optimus). The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. 

The professional GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

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. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T550 does not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.