On January 8, the big three in the PC hardware space, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, all revealed new products. AMD unveiled its Ryzen 8000G series desktop APUs, its first on the DDR5 platform, as well as much less exciting 7600 XT, a 16GB variant of the RX 7600.
Meanwhile, Intel released the rest of its desktop 14th Gen lineup and these aren"t as power-hungry as the K SKUs (A new driver is out as well). It also released Raptor Lake mobile U and HX parts. The latter, Intel has claimed is often faster than AMD"s fastest mobile gaming APU, the one with the 3D V-cache.
Out of the three, Nvidia definitely had the most impressive product reveal as it launched three new top-of-the-line desktop GPUs and also knocked down the price by a significant amount. The trio of new RTX 4000 Super GPUs: the RTX 4080 Super, the 4070 Ti Super, and the 4070 Super boast higher shaders as well as more VRAM in some cases.
Nvidia also disclosed the specifications of the GPUs, and the company, inadvertently seemed to have under-specced its RTX 4070 Super (spotted by Wccftech). After stating in its press release that the card features 36MB of level 2 (L2) cache, Nvidia has since quietly updated the spec sheet of the GPU and it now reads 48 MB of L2, which is an increase of 33%.
Nvidia took a page from AMD"s book and included this large pool of cache this time with its Ada Lovelace design. This cache pool helps compensate for memory bandwidth while also decreasing cache misses.
You can view the rectified L2 cache specification in the before/after image above. The before image shows the 36MB and the after image shows 48MB (the full AD104 GPU die).
While we aren"t exactly sure, the lower cache amount may have been a result of a miscommunication between the technical team and the marketing team as a specification upgrade in such short notice is not possible.