“Nothing is thrown away from the pig“says a peasant saying that, at times, can also find space in the world of semiconductors. As is known, the production yields – the working chips for each wafer made – are never equal to 100% and the task of a GPU designer and his production partner is to keep that percentage as high as possible to avoid waste and therefore loss of money, on both sides.
Not all GPUs come out perfect, so, cyclically, we see graphics chips designed for a given model of video card to land on other solutions which, according to statements by the parent company, are based on another GPU. Retrieve the recoverable, especially in an era of shortage in which production is unable to keep up with demand.
According to what reported by Matthew Smith, the one who is in charge of managing the valuable database of the TechPowerUp site, NVIDIA and its partners would beusing flawed GA104 GPUs aboard the GeForce RTX 3060, the smallest model in the Ampere desktop range to date, usually based on a GPU called the GA106.
Smith reports that the GA104 aboard this solution it has no differences in terms of specifications compared to the GA106 of a canonical RTX 3060, but “the new model” been identified because it is accompanied by a different ID.
According to
Videocardz, this RTX 3060 with GA104 will find space only in China, where the laws in defense of consumers are much more lascivious.
The GA104 has so far been used by NVIDIA for three models of desktop video cards, namely the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3070 Ti. In its maximum form the GA104 offers 6144 CUDA core, but in this new incarnation it undergoes a net weakening going down to 3584 CUDA cores.
We repeat, this is a common operation already implemented in the past by rival AMD. It can also be assumed that there will be no obvious performance differences, and therefore NVIDIA and its partners will not be forced to report the use of the GA104 instead of the GA106 in the card name.
In any case, not said that there may be some difference in specific scenarios: during the previous Turing generation, EVGA used a TU104 GPU instead of the classic TU106 for the GeForce RTX 2060 KO Gaming, and the tests highlighted performance with rendering loads such as Higher blender, compared to almost unchanged gaming results.