NVIDIA
Architecture
Ampere is NVIDIA's second-generation RTX architecture, built on Samsung's 8nm process. It introduced 3rd-generation Tensor Cores with support for sparsity-accelerated INT8 operations and improved FP16 throughput over Turing.
AI Relevance
Sparsity-aware Tensor Cores can effectively double throughput for structured sparse workloads. However, the lack of FP8 support means quantized inference is less efficient than Ada Lovelace or Blackwell.
Agentic Coding
CThis model is still usable for agentic-coding, but it is not the most specialized pick. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It should run, but memory headroom will be limited. Known channels: huggingface, ollama.
Chat
BThis model is a direct match for chat. It belongs to a current frontier family for local AI. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Known channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.
Coding
BThis model is still usable for coding, but it is not the most specialized pick. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Known channels: huggingface, ollama.
RAG
CThis model is a direct match for rag. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It should run, but memory headroom will be limited.
Reasoning
BThis model is a direct match for reasoning. It belongs to a current frontier family for local AI. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Known channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.
DeepSeek R1 0528 Qwen3 8BQwen3.5 9BQwen3.5 4B
Qwen2.5 3B Instruct
gemma 2bQwen2.5 1.5B Instruct
DeepSeek R1 671B
Devstral 2 123B Instruct
GLM-5Qwen3.5 27BQwen3.5 35B A3B
Kimi K2.5Mistral Large 3Mistral Small 4 119BQwen3-Coder 30B A3B InstructQwen3-Coder 480B A35B InstructQwen3-Coder-NextQwen3.5 122B A10BDeepSeek V3 671BMixtral 8x22BQwen 2.5 72BQwen 3 235B A22BQwen3-VL 30B A3B InstructQwen3.5 397B A17BDevstral Small 2 24B Instruct
Llama 3.3 70BLlama 4 Maverick 17B 128E
Command A 111BQwen 2.5 Coder 32BQwen 2.5 VL 72Bgemma 3 27b itCodestral 2 25.08Devstral Small 1.1Just out of reach
High-quality models that need a bit more memory
Upgrade paths
See what you unlock with more powerful hardware
Upgrade options
GTX 1080 Ti 11GBNext step up
RTX A2000 12GBNVIDIA upgrade
~$329 MSRP
~$8,000 MSRP
