AMD Radeon RX 6550M vs NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU

The NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU or A4500 Mobile is a professional graphics card for mobile workstations. It is based on the GA104 Ampere chip and similar to the consumer GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU. It offers 5,888 graphics cores, 46 RT cores, 184 Tensor cores and up to 16 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 256 Bit memory bus. It supports PCIe 4.0 and will be available in different variants from 80 to 140 Watt (TGP) with different clock speeds (and performance). The GPU supports eDP 1.4b to connect the internal monitor and DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 for external connections.

There is no more Max-Q variant (formerly used for the low power variants) but every OEM can choose to implement Max-Q technologies (Dynamic Boost, WhisperMode).

The raw performance should be similar to the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti laptop at the same TGP level. Both GPUs depend heavily on good cooling and a high TGP for good performance. At a similar power consumption level the RTX A4500 should be clearly faster than the old RTX A4000 and Quadro RTX 4000. The desktop variant of the A4500 however, is a lot faster.

The GA104 chip offers 6,144 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 3,072 INT32 ALUs). With Ampere all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The A4400 only uses 5,888 of the 6,144 CUDA cores. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA104 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip).