Please note that this post is tagged as a rumor .
NVIDIA AD103 GPU for RTX 4070
NVIDIA might be preparing to use salvage dies for (currently) the lowest tier SKU in RTX 40 lineup.
Thus far, we have not heard about any Ada GPUs being repurposed for other SKUs, but is about to change. According to NVIDIA hardware leaker @kopite7kimi, the company has now set plans to introduce AD103 GPU for RTX 4070.
As we know, the full AD103 GPU is currently not used by any graphics card on the market, but the RTX 4080 is the closest we got with 9728 CUDA Cores and just 5% of the GPU disabled. The rumored RTX 4070 with AD103 GPU would be a different story. This SKU has 5888 CUDA cores, so should NVIDIA use the bigger GPU instead, this would mean 42% of the GPU partially disabled.
RTX 4070 can have a version based on AD103.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) May 9, 2023
Board partners should not encounter issues with the GPU swap, as AD103 and AD104 are pin compatible. The AD103 GPU will be heavily cut and will use lower TDP, so they can easily adopt the same cooling designs. Questions that may arise would be related to L3 cache size, ROP count and encoding capabilities, as those features are usually affected by GPU swapping.
One should note however that GeForce desktop cards are no stranger to mixed GPU specs. Those are commonly sold on the Chinese market, and we have seen plethora of RTX 3070 and 3060 designs with non-standard GPUs. This may explain why NVIDIA is not displaying the exact GPU names on their official website, but only provides this information to reviewers. However, many board partners who use mix GPUs often create separate variants, just to make sure customers know what card they are buying.
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 vs. 3070 Series | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 “AD103” | RTX 4070 | RTX 3070 Ti | RTX 3070 |
| Picture |  |  | |  |  |
| Board-SKU | PG141-SKU331 | TBC | PG141-SKU344 | PG143-SKU15 | PG142-SKU10 |
| Architecture | Ada (TSMC 4N) | Ada (TSMC 4N) | Ada (TSMC 4N) | Ampere (SAMSUNG 8N) | Ampere (SAMSUNG 8N) |
| GPU | AD104-400 | AD103-??? | AD104-250 | GA104-400 | GA104-30X |
| L2 Cache | TBC | ||||
| CUDA Cores | |||||
| RT Cores | |||||
| Base Clock | TBC | ||||
| Boost Clock | TBC | ||||
| Max FP32 Compute | TBC | ||||
| Memory | |||||
| Memory Bus | |||||
| Memory Speed | |||||
| Memory Bandwidth | |||||
| TDP | TBC | ||||
| Interface | PCIe Gen4 x16 | PCIe Gen4 x16 | PCIe Gen4 x16 | PCIe Gen4 x16 | PCIe Gen4 x16 |
| MSRP | |||||
| Release Date | January 5, 2023 | TBC | April 13, 2023 | June 10, 2021 | May 8, 2021 |
Source: @kopite7kimi