Nvidia Rumored to Upgrades Blackwell GPUs with More Cores and Wider Memory Bus

According to a recent rumor, Nvidia is not slowing down its efforts in the GPU market. The company is reportedly planning significant upgrades for its upcoming Blackwell series of GPUs for data centers and gaming. The rumor comes from notorious hardware leaker @kopite7kimi on Twitter, who revealed that the Blackwell series will feature a 512-bit memory bus and 33% more CUDA cores.

The flagship GeForce die for Blackwell, known as GB202, is said to have 12 graphics processing clusters (GPCs) with eight texture processing clusters (TPCs) per unit and two streaming multiprocessors (SMs) per TPC. This configuration would result in a total of 192 streaming multiprocessors, a 33% increase from the current AD102 die. The “full fat” chip for the GeForce version is expected to have a total of 24,576 CUDA cores.

In addition to the increased number of cores, Nvidia is also rumored to be upgrading the memory bus on the GeForce die to 512-bit, up from 384-bit in previous generations of high-end GPUs. The wider memory bus, combined with the expected move to GDDR7 memory in 2025, could potentially result in up to 2TB/s of memory bandwidth on a theoretical RTX 5090.

However, it is important to approach these rumors with skepticism, as they are still far from the launch of the Blackwell series. That being said, @kopite7kimi has been reliable in the past, adding credibility to the information.

Nvidia’s decision to jump from TSMC 5nm to 3nm with Blackwell is expected to provide a significant uplift in performance. The leap from the RTX 3090 to the 4090 was already impressive, taking many by surprise, including AMD. It remains to be seen if Nvidia can replicate that success and deliver a high-performance GPU that is also reasonably priced.

Furthermore, there may not be any strong competition for Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 card, as AMD is rumored to be focusing more on AI accelerators rather than competing in the gaming card market. AMD has previously expressed concerns about the cost and power consumption of high-end gaming cards.

In conclusion, Nvidia is rumored to be making significant upgrades to its upcoming Blackwell series of GPUs, including more CUDA cores and a wider memory bus. These improvements, combined with the jump to TSMC 3nm and the potential use of GDDR7 memory, could result in a powerful and high-bandwidth GPU. However, these rumors should be taken with caution until official announcements are made.

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