NVIDIA kills NVLink support for Ada Lovelace, a silent death for SLI

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs do not support NVLink, and have no NVLink physical connector on the cards whatsoever... disappointing, but expected.

The news is coming directly from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who on a call with the tech press he said that Ada Lovelace drops the NVLink connector so that the I/O room for "something else". We do know that NVIDIA has crammed a helluva lot more into Ada Lovelace GPUs, with transistors, CUDA core, and ROP counts going through the roof.

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Jensen said that NVIDIA engineers wanted to use as much of the silicon area they had their hands-on to "cram in as much AI processing as we could". We also now know: Ada Lovelace does NOT support PCIe 5.0, but NVIDIA included the Gen5 power connector.

We also now know: Ada Lovelace does NOT support PCIe 5.0, but NVIDIA included the Gen5 power connector. NVIDIA noted to TechPowerUp: "Ada does not support PCIe Gen 5, but the Gen 5 power connector is included. PCIe Gen 4 provides plenty of bandwidth for graphics usages today, so we felt it wasn't necessary to implement Gen 5 for this generation of graphics cards. The large framebuffers and large L2 caches of Ada GPUs also reduce utilization of the PCIe interface".