Nvidia has unexpectedly announced the most powerful PC GPU ever created.
The GV100-powered Titan V, which is fabricated on a new TSMC 12-nanometer FFN high-performance manufacturing process, is available today for $3,000. It features 110 teraflops of raw performance, 21.1 billion transistors, 12GB of HMB2 memory, 5120 CUDA Cores, and 640 tensor cores. Nvidia says it has nine times the horsepower of its predecessor, the Pascal-based Titan Xp.
Nvidia is trumpeting the Titan V as offering 110 TFLOPS of horsepower, “9x that of its predecessor.” We don’t doubt that’s literally true, but it’s not a comparison to the single-precision or double-precision math we’ve typically referenced when discussing GPU FLOPS performance. It’s a reference to Volta’s performance improvement in deep learning tasks over Pascal, and it’ s derived by comparing Volta’s tensor performance (with its specialized tensor cores) against Pascal’s 32-bit single-precision throughput.
That doesn’t mean the comparison is invalid, since Volta has specialized tensor cores for training neural networks, and Pascal doesn’t, but it’s a little like comparing AES encryption performance on a CPU with specialized hardware for that workload with another CPU that lacks it. But it’s fair only for the specific metric being measured, as opposed to being a generalizable test case for the rate of improvement one CPU offers over the other.
Nvidia’s stated goal with the Titan V is to offer researchers who don’t have access to supercomputers or big iron HPC installations the same access to cutting-edge hardware performance that their compatriots enjoy. While the GPU is priced at an eye-popping $3,000 (relative to the regular PC market), that’s not very much compared with the typical cost of an HPC server.
This GPU family has been moving back towards its scientific computing research roots for a number of years.
You can buy a Titan V at the Nvidia store right now.