NVIDIA RTX 30-series GA102 IR Photographs Appear, Expose Silicon Inner Workings

[Raevenlord]

IR photographs are one of the best ways to take a look at the inner silicon etchings inside the world's most powerful accelerators. Of course, one could always just "shove off the top", but that would be a crime unto itself. Fritchens Fritz has pointed an IR gun at the heart of NVIDIA's GA102, the crown jewel of the RTX 30-series, and the results are an intimate look at some of the world's most powerful hardware. The 642 mm² chip showcases all of its precision-engineered resources that allow gamers to achieve (almost) 60 FPS in 4K resolution in Cyberpunk 2077, with rows upon rows of transistor building blocks mirroring NVIDIA's (representative) chip resource breakdown in the Ampere whitepaper.

The seven vertical rows showcase the GA102's Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs) - and in each of those rows, one can count 12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). Image definition goes slightly downhill from there; but if you compare side-by-side with NVIDIA's own Ampere shots, you'll certainly be able to plot the different transistor arrangements that form the Tensor, RT, and CUDA cores.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[windwhirl]

That kind of photography is so cool. It really shows how incredibly small yet complex these things are.

Btw, the gallery with the original quality files can be found here:

Fritzchens Fritz

Explore Fritzchens Fritz’s 2,714 photos on Flickr!

www.flickr.com

 

[crow1001]

almost 60 fps you say.....

 

[windwhirl]

almost 60 fps you say.....

*Here we go again*
Raevenlord didn't say anything about the supposed quality that the game would be run at. There is nothing to throw a smart comment about.

 

[olstyle]

Of course, one could always just "shove off the top", but that would be a crime unto itself.

Well that IS what Fritzchen normally does (see the older Images from the linked Flickr) so I am a bit surprised by the unintrusive solution used here.

 

[windwhirl]

Well that IS what Fritzchen normally does (see the older Images from the linked Flickr) so I am a bit surprised by the unintrusive solution used here.

Probably because finding this GPU again is nearly impossible, never mind buying it again at a reasonable price. Better just go with the unintrusive approach and still have a working 3090 at the end of the day.

 

[olstyle]

That's why I am just a bit surprised
An annotated version was done by Locuza again (as always with those shots) by the way

https://twitter.com/x/status/1338265403022323713

 

[windwhirl]

An annotated version was done by Locuza again (as always with those shots) by the way

https://twitter.com/x/status/1338265403022323713

Ah, I simply love that stuff.

 

[mechtech]

Would those pics fall under voyeurism??