Nvidia GPU with 7,552 CUDA cores spotted in benchmark database

Through the looking glass: A pair of next-gen Nvidia graphics cards have been discovered in the Geekbench database. One has 118 compute units, and the other 108. Given compute units generally contain 64 cores, the two cards are implied to have 7,552 and 6,912 CUDA cores, respectively… with a catch. Geekbench counts compute units, but the structure of compute units can vary from generation to generation. Nvidia is also known to modify core configurations between generations.

When transitioning from Pascal to Turing, Nvidia halved the number of CUDA cores from 128 to 64 per Streaming Multiprocessor (colloquially, the compute unit). However, while Pascal has FP32 ALUs as the backbone of a CUDA core, Turing pairs an FP32 ALU with an INT32 ALU in every CUDA core, increasing the performance of each core by about one-third.

You can read more about this in our Navi vs. Turing architecture comparison.

Nvidia could boost the per-core performance again with the next generation, or, as rumors suggest, go the other way and increase the ratio of FP32 ALUs to INT32 ALUs in an attempt to increase efficiency. The bottom line is, until Nvidia tells us how they’re configuring their next-gen architecture, nothing is guaranteed. What Geekbench registers as a compute unit may be a device we’re unfamiliar with, and contain CUDA cores that perform better or worse than what we’re used to.

But let’s not spoil all the fun. These GPUs are, without a doubt, next-gen hardware that offer unprecedented levels of performance.

Contained within the Geekbench entries are the GPUs’ OpenCL benchmark scores. The big one reaches 184,096 points and the little one (isn’t that an oxymoron) gets 141,654. For comparison, the RTX 2080 Ti gets roughly 130,000.

It’s also a pretty safe bet that this pair are underperforming members of their species. The big one had a maximum clock, as recorded by Geekbench, of 1.11 GHz. The little one ran at 1.01 GHz. By the time the silicon graduates from engineering sample status they’ll probably reach full-blooded clocks of well over 1.5 GHz, and their performance will improve accordingly.

At a guess, I’d say that this pair are prototypes of next generation Quadro flagships. Their respective memory capacities of 48 GB and 24 GB exclude them from being gaming cards. But Nvidia uses almost identical silicon for its flagship Quadro and GeForce cards, so you could estimate the sequel to the RTX 2080 Ti to have about 7,000 cores – whatever those cores are made of.