NVIDIA RTX A4000 Laptop GPU vs Intel Arc A530M vs Intel Arc A380

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).

The Intel Arc A380 is a low-cost single-seed desktop GPU and is manufactured at TSMC using the 6 nm process. The graphics processor has the internal designation DG2-128 and combines 1,024 shader units. In terms of VRAM, you still get 6 GB GDDR6, which are connected via a 96-bit interface (15.5 Gbps, 186 GB/s). This makes the Intel Arc A380 the fourth fastest graphics card model from Intel.

Features

As the Intel Arc A380 is also based on the Alchemist architecture, the small model also has the same features as the faster models of the current Arc models. Nevertheless, there are significant performance limitations compared to the faster models. The most useful feature is certainly AV1 support, which enables encoding and decoding on the hardware side.

Performance

The performance of the Intel Arc A380 cannot keep up with current graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia. In view of this, this graphics card is not recommended exclusively for gaming use.

Power consumption

The power consumption of the Intel Arc A380 is estimated by the manufacturer at 75 watts (TGP). In terms of efficiency, the Intel Arc A380 is not convincing due to its low 3D performance. In the internal duel, the Intel Arc A380 is slightly more efficient than an Intel Arc A580 or an Intel Arc A750.