According to Nvidia, the new A100 graphics card will offer a 20-times performance boost when running AI-powered applications compared with the company’s V100 GPU from three years ago.
(Credit: Nvidia)
How Nvidia’s Ampere architecture will improve the company’s gaming graphics cards remains a mystery. But on Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up how the technology will supercharge the company’s enterprise GPUs.
The Ampere architecture will first end up in the A100, a graphics card designed for data analytics and scientific computing. According to Nvidia, the A100 will offer a 20-times performance boost when running AI-powered applications compared with the company’s V100 GPU from three years ago.
The A100 GPU (Credit: Nvidia)
The new card itself contains 54.2 billion transistors, 6,912 CUDA Cores, a 40GB memory size, which can produce a memory bandwidth of 1.6 TB/sec, or what Huang said is an industry first. The company was able to do this with the help of TSMC’s 7-nanometer manufacturing technology, which can pack more transistors on the silicon. (Full specs for the A100 can be found here.)
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In contrast, the older V100 GPU —which only has 21 billion transistors— is capable of a 900 GB/sec memory bandwidth using the older 12nm fabrication technology.
