Mobile version of RTX 3070 spotted, expectations are sky-high

According to rumors, the RTX 3070 for notebooks will receive 8GB of GDDR6 video memory.

There was a snapshot of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 chip for laptops, the photo was posted on Twitter, and the main excitement is about the performance potential in the mobile iteration, but at this point it’s wise to moderate expectations.

The image was posted to Twitter by HXL and appears to be a test sample of the GA104 mobile GPU, but of course be aware of caution with early leaks.

Tom’s Hardware users can’t help but rejoice at the promise of the RTX 3070 for laptops, which offers the same specs as the desktop version of the graphics card (i.e. 5888 CUDA cores). If that’s true, then we’re getting a GPU with performance equivalent to the RTX 2080 Ti (which Nvidia’s internal testing shows is pretty much on par with the desktop version of the RTX 3070).

| A LITTLE REALISM

It’s tempting, of course, but let’s be realistic. While mobile graphics cards have certainly made great strides, performance is often lower than the desktop version. Even if the card has the same number of cores, the mobile GPU will likely run slower given the laptop’s available power and thermal constraints. The mobile RTX 2070 was noticeably slower than the desktop 2070 and looked more like a GTX 1080.

A similar situation occurs with the RTX 3070, we can probably expect something similar to the situation of the RTX 2080 (not the 2080 Ti). Don’t get us wrong, the result is still impressive for a laptop graphics card.

As Tom’s Hardware further notes, the images show a GPU with eight SK Hynix GDDR6 memory chips, each with 1GB, meaning the mobile RTX 3070 is going to offer 8GB of GDDR6 video memory (and a 256-bit memory interface).

Taking a look at the chip sample, you might think we’ll see a mobile GPU sooner rather than later, but the reality is that the RTX 3070 for laptops probably won’t be out very soon. Indeed, stocks of Nvidia’s full-fledged Ampere graphics cards seem mediocre, and that doesn’t bode well for a mobile release.

Thus, we are betting that mobile variants of Ampere GPUs will not appear until 2021 or even in April – but this is just a guess so far.

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