Some Mid-Range NVIDIA GPUs May Soon Use New Silicon Under The Hood
Some Mid-Range NVIDIA GPUs May Soon Use New Silicon Under The Hood
Hardware leaker MEGAsizeGPU has noted that NVIDIA may switch to different chips for its RTX 4070, RTX 4060 Ti, and RTX 4060 desktop GPUs. This meant that these GPUs may use a bigger silicon, though the specs will be the same as before.
It’s not uncommon for NVIDIA to switch to a different silicon for a particular GPU a year or two into production to maximize the revenue from the chips’ production. The nature of semiconductors meant defects are common – that said, “defective” simply means it’s unable to fully function with all of its cores, which can be repurposed for a lower-tier model in a process called silicon binning.
In this case, NVIDIA is repurposing some of the bigger chips that do not meet the requirements for it to be on the higher-end products, and will instead be powering the company’s mid-range models. For the RTX 4070, this means it’ll be using the bigger AD103 silicon, while the RTX 4060 Ti will use the AD104 silicon originally intended for the RTX 4070. RTX 4060 follows this trend with the new variant using AD106 designed for RTX 4060 Ti originally.
To the end user, this should mean very little difference in practice. Given that NVIDIA will simply disable any excess cores to match the specs of the product, you won’t see any performance difference between the original variant and the updated variants. That said, a minor change in thermal characteristics is possible, as a bigger silicon usually means slightly lesser thermal density, which should mean slightly cooler temperatures in general.
Source: Videocardz
Pokdepinion: In hindsight, perhaps these should be the silicon to be used in the first place. The gen-over-gen improvement wasn’t exactly stellar when you compare it to the flagship models.
