Nvidia's new RTX 6000 Ada professional GPU has started popping up in online listings, along with the price. The card is currently listed at CompSource and ShopBLT with a suggested retail price of $9,999. Luckily, both stores are offering a discount off the "suggested retail price," dropping the price of the card to just $8,209.65 and $7,377.71, respectively, at the time of this writing.
The RTX 6000 Ada is Nvidia's latest professional GPU, and is one of the first "prosumer" GPUs to adopt Nvidia's most recent Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. According to PNY's spec sheet, the RTX 6000 Ada is a monster, with 76.3 billion transistors, 18,176 CUDA cores, 568 Tensor cores for AI-focused workloads, and 142 Gen-3 RT cores for ray tracing.
Compared to the Nvidia RTX 4090, the RTX 6000 Ada has 1,792 (10.93%) more CUDA cores. Surprisingly, Nvidia is still not using a fully-unlocked AD102 die — which has 18,432 CUDA cores and two more SMs — for the RTX 6000 Ada. Note that the RTX 6000 sticks with the same 300W TBP (Total Board Power) limit of the previous generation card, as workstations are more likely to use multiple cards and don't necessarily want a single 450W card.
Nvidia previously stated that the RTX 6000 Ada will be substantially faster than the previous generation RTX A6000 (those names aren't confusing at all), offering up to two to four times the performance, thanks to massive increase in CUDA and RT cores.
The specific model listed at CompSource and ShopBLT uses Nvidia's reference model design and is manufactured by PNY. This design has a blower-style cooler covered in a pure black shroud. The blower is designed for compact server chassis and workstations, where the GPU needs to handle all of its heat extraction independently — the blower directs hot air outside of the chassis without relying on help from the chassis fans.
The card is measures 10.5 inches by 4.4 inches and features a dual-slot form factor running on a PCIe Gen 4 x16 interface. It's equipped with 48GB of ECC GDDR6 memory operating on a 384-bit wide bus.
If the suggested retail price listed at CompSource and ShopBLT is accurate, the RTX 6000 Ada is priced far higher than its predecessor, which is listed at Nvidia for $4,650. Even at the ShopBLT discounted price of $7,377.71, the RTX 6000 Ada is almost 60% more expensive than the RTX A6000. If Nvidia's statement that the RTX 6000 Ada offers two to four times the performance is correct, it might still be worth paying twice the price — at least for the right professional users.
