20% smaller, better cooling?

NVIDIA has everything ready to land with its mid-range and low-end chips. Although we gave many leaked details about them, we now have the first images and dimensions of what they will be like. The most interesting thing is undoubtedly its size, which will allow, together with the fact that lower consumption is expected, at least in laptops, to offer cooling solutions that are oversized compared to the area of ​​the chip. So will be the AD106 and AD107.

Everything is ready and the only thing left is for the final details to be put up for sale. NVIDIA’s mid-range and low-end chips will arrive first in gaming laptops and later on the desktop, where apparently the silicon will be the same and everything will depend on the BIOS to be implemented.

NVIDIA AD106 and AD107, a size improvement thanks to TSMC

Tonight I leak #Nvidia‘s AD107 & AD106 dies. These things are smaller than the GA107 die used in the laptop 3050…and yet they are about to be sold like they are High End GPUs…🤯💰

I hope nobody pays thousands of dollars for these, and then we get good Back to School Sales… pic.twitter.com/tHD1shRfHM

— Moore’s Law Is Dead (@mooreslawisdead) February 3, 2023

The images do not show the specific SKU, since they are distorted in the die, but they do offer other details such as dimensions. Curiously, the electrical resistances that normally surround them are hidden, mainly so as not to give too many clues about the circuitry, consumption and its possible unlocking of it.

As we surely intuit, the AD106 will be the one that is intended for laptops with RTX 4070, while the more versatile AD107 will arrive for the RTX 4060 and RTX 4050 in their corresponding models according to the manufacturers. Here the important thing and where everything is focused is the price and the total area that each chip will have, since the price at which the wafers are is determining how much silicon is spent.

The AD107 will have a total area that has been determined between 150 and 160 mm2which is awfully small compared to its predecessor, where this one got under Samsung’s 8nm 200mm2. This equates to an area a 20% lower for the new chip, a very considerable reduction.

Larger area, better dissipation, but less space to implement it

Since these GPUs are going into laptops, their mm2/watt ratio is crucial to being able to cool them at the lowest cost for manufacturers, as long as the chip doesn’t skyrocket in price on its own, of course. With the AD106 we have an approximate area of ​​between 180mm and 190mmwhich means a reduction in the 30% versus the GA106 with 276 mm2so the improvement here is greater than against its little brother.

This will allow both chips to have the same watts available to be configured by the manufacturers (between 35W to 115Wwith a maximum setting of +25W) the cooling capacity for the same dissipation system is better in the AD106 than in the AD107, something that will almost certainly be offset by higher frequencies for the second compared to the first.

As leaked, the AD107 would reach the 2,370MHzMeanwhile he AD106 would get 2.175MHzboth with the same consumption and therefore, at the same dissipation, the older of the brothers would achieve better temperatures due to its greater area in contact with the current heatsink.

When it comes to prices, laptops with the AD107 they should start with $999while those that integrate the AD106 will go up to €1,500.