Nvidia’s more powerful laptop GPUs could be inbound – but may not arrive as soon as you’d like

Press shot of an Nvidia chip
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia could release RTX Super versions of some of its Ampere laptop GPUs early on in 2022, according to the latest chatter from the grapevine.

As VideoCardz reports, this is the case according to a leaker on Twitter, although there are some caveats with the source here.

Twitter user @greymon55 is new to the social media outlet and only has a handful of followers, so buckets of salt are required rather than the usual pinches – but there are other rumors which reinforce this speculation.

Primarily, VideoCardz itself – a reasonably reliable source of hardware leaks – claims that this corroborates a rumor which it has heard, and furthermore, other evidence for this was spotted last month in a purported leaked presentation roadmap from Lenovo.

That roadmap, assuming it wasn’t somehow faked, clearly showed that there are RTX 3080 Super and RTX 3070 Super mobile graphics cards in the pipeline for Lenovo laptops. Specifically the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme G4, which will theoretically have options for an RTX 3070 Super (with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM) and an RTX 3080 Super (with 16GB of GDDR6).

GPU uncertainty

Previous churning from the rumor mill indicates that in the case of the 3080 Super mobile variant, Nvidia might step up from the GA104 GPU used in the vanilla RTX 3080 notebook GPU to use a GA103 chip – simply because more oomph would be needed, as the RTX 3080 mobile is already pushed to the max with the GA104.

Others have been skeptical about that prospect, and hardware leaker kopite7kimi – who originally spilled the beans on the possible GA103 GPU – has now said it’s likely canceled.

At any rate, whatever powers these RTX Super laptop graphics cards, there’s certainly some evidence that they may be inbound, even if these GPUs may not turn up as soon as we thought given their appearance in that Lenovo leak. Of course, with the current climate of component shortages, delays of one kind or another are an ever-present danger…

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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