NVIDIA Readies Ampere A100 PCIe GPU With 80 GB HBM2e Memory & Up To 2 TB/s Bandwidth

NVIDIA is possibly making its fastest GPU, the Ampere A100, even faster with twice the memory capacity and record-breaking memory bandwidth. This is acknowledged by NVIDIA's own listing that has been discovered by Videocardz.

The existing NVIDIA A100 HPC accelerator was introduced last year in June and it looks like the green team is planning to give it a major spec upgrade. The chip is based on NVIDIA's largest Ampere GPU, the A100, which measures 826mm2 and houses an insane 54 billion transistors. NVIDIA gives its HPC accelerators a spec boost during mid-cycle which means that we will be hearing about the next-generation accelerators at GTC 2022.

In terms of specifications, the A100 PCIe GPU accelerator doesn't change much in terms of core configuration. The GA100 GPU retains the specifications we got to see on the 250W variant with 6912 CUDA cores arranged in 108 SM units, 432 Tensor Cores, and 80 GB of HBM2e memory that delivers higher bandwidth of 2.0 TB/s compared to 1.55 TB/s on the 40 GB variant.

The A100 SMX variant already comes with 80 GB memory but it doesn't feature the faster HBM2e dies like this upcoming A100 PCIe variant. This is also the most amount of memory ever featured on a PCIe-based graphics card but don't expect consumer graphics cards to feature such high capacities any time soon. What's interesting is that the power rating remains unchanged which means that we are looking at higher density chips binned for high-performance use cases.

The FP64 performance is still rated at 9.7/19.5 TFLOPs, FP32 performance is rated at 19.5 /156/312 TFLOPs (Sparsity), FP16 performance is rated at 312/624 TFLOPs (Sparsity) and the INT8 is rated at 624/1248 TOPs (Sparsity). NVIDIA is planning to release its latest HPC accelerator next week and we can also expect the pricing of over $20,000 US considering the 40 GB A100 variant sells for around $15,000 US.