NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA Quadro 1000M vs NVIDIA RTX A500 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU or A4500 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and similar to the consumer GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU. It offers 5,888 graphics cores, 46 RT cores, 184 Tensor cores and up to 16 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 256 Bit memory bus. It supports PCIe 4.0 and will be available in different variants from 80 to 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 Ti laptop 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 A4500 should be clearly faster than the old RTX A4000 and Quadro RTX 4000. The desktop variant of the A4500 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 Ampere all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The A4500 only uses 5,888 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 NVIDIA Quadro 1000M is a professional workstation graphics card based on the Fermi architecture (probably the same chip like the consumer GeForce GT 540M). Compared to the 5010M, the 1000M does not support ECC memory and DP floating point calculations. According to the clock rates, the Quadro 1000M should be positioned between the GT 540M and 550M.

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications like CAD, DCC, medicine, or visualisation areas. The OpenGL performance for example should be significantly better than similar specified GeForce graphics cards.

The shader / CUDA cores can be accessed using DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1 for graphic rendering and DirectCompute, OpenCL, AXE, and CUDA for general purpose calculations. Due to the new Fermi core, the 1000M should offer a high performance in general purpose calculations.

Furthermore, the Nvidia Quadro 1000M is compatible with the new stereoscopic solution by Nvidia called: NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro.

To automatically switch between the processor graphics card and the Quadro, the 1000M supports Nvidia Optimus (if the laptop vendor chooses to integrate it).

The Quadro 1000M is specified at 45 Watt TDP and therefore suited for 15.6" laptops.

The NVIDIA RTX A500 Laptop GPU or A500 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA107 Ampere chip and offers a slower performance than the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU. It offers 2,048 CUDA, 16 Raytracing and 64 Tensor cores paired with a 64 Bit memory bus. It is available in different variants from 20 - 60 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 slower than the 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 A500 should be clearly faster than the old T500 and T550. 

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. The A500 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).