Nvidia Announces Ampere GPU Architecture and A100 GPU
takyon writes:
NVIDIA Ampere Unleashed: NVIDIA Announces New GPU Architecture, A100 GPU, and Accelerator
Like the Volta reveal 3 years ago - and is now traditional for NVIDIA GTC reveals - today's focus is on the very high end of the market. In 2017 NVIDIA launched the Volta-based GV100 GPU, and with it the V100 accelerator. V100 was a massive success for the company, greatly expanding their datacenter business on the back of the Volta architecture's novel tensor cores and sheer brute force that can only be provided by a 800mm2+ GPU. Now in 2020, the company is looking to continue that growth with Volta's successor, the Ampere architecture.
[...] Designed to be the successor to the V100 accelerator, the A100 aims just as high, just as we'd expect from NVIDIA's new flagship accelerator for compute. The leading Ampere part is built on TSMC's 7nm process and incorporates a whopping 54 billion transistors, 2.5x as many as the V100 before it. NVIDIA has put the full density improvements offered by the 7nm process in use, and then some, as the resulting GPU die is 826mm2 in size, even larger than the GV100. NVIDIA went big on the last generation, and in order to top themselves they've gone even bigger this generation.
We'll touch more on the individual specifications a bit later, but at a high level it's clear that NVIDIA has invested more in some areas than others. FP32 performance is, on paper, only modestly improved from the V100. Meanwhile tensor performance is greatly improved - almost 2.5x for FP16 tensors - and NVIDIA has greatly expanded the formats that can be used with INT8/4 support, as well as a new FP32-ish format called TF32. Memory bandwidth is also significantly expected[sic], with multiple stacks of HBM2 memory delivering a total of 1.6TB/second of bandwidth to feed the beast that is Ampere.
See also: Nvidia's first Ampere GPU is designed for data centers and AI, not your PC
Nvidia unveils Ampere GPU architecture for AI boost, and the first target is coronavirus
Previously: NVIDIA's Volta Architecture Unveiled: GV100 and Tesla V100
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