Nvidia's mighty GeForce RTX 3080 GPU will hit laptop PCs in January, so says WCCFTech. That's all we've got to go on for now, but that would have these mobile chips arrive roughly when we'd expect them to, and reportedly with belated support for AMD processors in tow.
The full range of new GPUs will include 3080, 3070 and 3060 Mobility chips. The 3080 and 3070 will land first, in January, with ASUS and MSI mooted as launch partners.
Price-wise, Nvidia is said to expect system prices for 3060-powered laptops to start at $999, 3070 lappies will kick off at $1,299 and 3080 beasties from $1,999. Just like previous Nvidia GPUs for laptops, expect to see both Max-Q and Max-P iterations, with the former running at significantly lower clocks in order to squeeze into thin-and-light chassis.
The one exception to that is expected to be the 3080, which will only get a Max-Q variant. If true, that likely reflects the power hungry nature of the 3080's massive Ampere A102 GPU.
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None of this is official, as yet. But if Nvidia does indeed maintain consistency across its desktop and mobile Ampere GPUs, then it will be the first time in a while that it's biggest, beefiest GPU has made the leap to mobile. The outgoing RTX 2080 Mobility, of course, was based on the second tier TU104 chip, not the big-boy TU102 as found in the RTX 2080 Ti.
What's more, the WCCF story also reckons the new Ampere mobile chips will play nicely with AMD CPUs. Previously, laptops with AMD's impressive Renoir eight-core chip have been limited to being paired with the RTX 2060 as the top available GPU. Reportedly, that's because Renoir is limited to just eight PCIe Gen 3 lanes in terms of GPU connectivity, making the otherwise excellent chip suboptimal for high-end GPU pairing.
However, AMD's upcoming Cezanne mobile CPU, expected to be branded under the Ryzen 5000 banner, is expected to solve that limitation and open the way for high-end Nvidia GPUs to be combined with both Intel and AMD processors.
We're also expecting AMD to launch mobile versions of its new Radeon RX 6000 family in the first half of next year. So, the next six months look super exciting for laptop fanciers.
