Coming hot off the heels of a potential RTX 3070 mobile GPU, a new post from twitter user @Avery78 (via Videocardz) shows a picture of Nvidia's desktop GA104-300 Ampere GPUs being validated for production. The picture originated from a user on the Baidu forums, but it has since been removed. As with all leaked info, though, we have to approach this with some caution, but it does appear to be legitimate.
The GA104-300 is assumed to be a cut-down version of the GA104 die, with 5888 CUDA cores, 184 TMUs, and 96 ROPS. This would be the RTX 3070 GPU, which features the same specifications. However, it could also be a different configuration for RTX 3060 or RTX 3060 Ti. Two or possibly all three (3060 Ti) of those GPUs are expected to launch in the next two months, to compete with future RDNA2 products.
The actual maximum core counts for GA104 is 48 SMs, according to the Nvidia GA10x whitepaper. (Page 40 says GA104 Full GPU with 48 SMs.) If there's going to be a faster RTX 3070 Ti, Nvidia would almost certainly need to move to GA102, perhaps with fewer GPCs and SMs enabled compared to RTX 3080. But the full or nearly-full configuration for Nvidia GPUs is normally labeled xxx-400 (i.e., RTX 2080 was TU104-400-A1), while trimmed configurations are xxx-300 (RTX 2080 Ti was TU102-300-K1-A1, while Titan RTX was TU102-400-A1). The pictured image could thus be something other than RTX 3070.
Regardless, having RTX 3070 in full production comes as no surprise, as the RTX 3070 launches on October 29th. RTX 3060 and/or RTX 3060 Ti are likewise rumored to arrive by Black Friday, though Nvidia hasn't officially announced either part. Performance for the RTX 3070 should be somewhere around the RTX 2080 Ti as indicated by Nvidia's latest slide showcasing RTX 3070 performance vs the Turing generation. Let's hope the delayed launch will allow supply to surpass demand at least for a little while.
