Wednesday, May 10th 2017
NVIDIA Announces Its Volta-based Tesla V100
Today at its GTC keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took the wraps on some of the features on their upcoming V100 accelerator, the Volta-based accelerator for the professional market that will likely pave the way to the company's next-generation 2000 series GeForce graphics cards. If NVIDIA goes on with its product carvings and naming scheme for the next-generation Volta architecture, we can expect to see this processor on the company's next-generation GTX 2080 Ti. Running the nitty-gritty details (like the new Tensor processing approach) on this piece would be impossible, but there are some things we know already from this presentation.
This chip is a beast of a processor: it packs 21 billion transistors (up from 15,3 billion found on the P100); it's built on TSMC's 12 nm FF process (evolving from Pascal's 16 nm FF); and measures a staggering 815 mm² (from the P100's 610 mm².) This is such a considerable leap in die-area that we can only speculate on how yields will be for this monstrous chip, especially considering the novelty of the 12 nm process that it's going to leverage. But now, the most interesting details from a gaming perspective are the 5,120 CUDA cores powering the V100 out of a total possible 5,376 in the whole chip design, which NVIDIA will likely leave for their Titan Xv. These are divided in 84 Volta Streaming Multiprocessor Units with each carrying 64 CUDA cores (84 x 64 = 5,376, from which NVIDIA is cutting 4 Volta Streaming Multiprocessor Units for yields, most likely, which accounts for the announced 5,120.) Even in this cut-down configuration, we're looking at a staggering 42% higher pure CUDA core-count than the P100's. The new V100 will offer up to 15 FP 32 TFLOPS, and will still leverage a 16 GB HBM2 implementation delivering up to 900 GB/s bandwidth (up from the P100's 721 GB/s). No details on clock speed or TDP as of yet, but we already have enough details to enable a lengthy discussion... Wouldn't you agree?
This chip is a beast of a processor: it packs 21 billion transistors (up from 15,3 billion found on the P100); it's built on TSMC's 12 nm FF process (evolving from Pascal's 16 nm FF); and measures a staggering 815 mm² (from the P100's 610 mm².) This is such a considerable leap in die-area that we can only speculate on how yields will be for this monstrous chip, especially considering the novelty of the 12 nm process that it's going to leverage. But now, the most interesting details from a gaming perspective are the 5,120 CUDA cores powering the V100 out of a total possible 5,376 in the whole chip design, which NVIDIA will likely leave for their Titan Xv. These are divided in 84 Volta Streaming Multiprocessor Units with each carrying 64 CUDA cores (84 x 64 = 5,376, from which NVIDIA is cutting 4 Volta Streaming Multiprocessor Units for yields, most likely, which accounts for the announced 5,120.) Even in this cut-down configuration, we're looking at a staggering 42% higher pure CUDA core-count than the P100's. The new V100 will offer up to 15 FP 32 TFLOPS, and will still leverage a 16 GB HBM2 implementation delivering up to 900 GB/s bandwidth (up from the P100's 721 GB/s). No details on clock speed or TDP as of yet, but we already have enough details to enable a lengthy discussion... Wouldn't you agree?