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Nvidia announces the Tesla V100, the first Volta GPU

Today Nvidia kicked off the GPU Technology Conference, with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang taking the stage to announce its very first GPU based on the Volta architecture- the Tesla V100. This is the most advanced accelerator ever built, powered by 5120 CUDA cores, over 21 billion transistors and 16GB of HBM2 running at 900 GB/s.

The GV100 includes 21.1 billion transistors in total with a die size of 815 mm2. It is fabricated on a new TSMC 12nm FFN high performance manufacturing process. In all, it is a considerable jump in compute performance compared to the Pascal GP100.

To improve FP31 and FP64 performance, Nvidia has equipped the GV100 with a new SM Processor architecture. The new Volta SM is 50 percent more energy efficient than the Pascal design. On top of that, Volta is equipped with new ‘Tensor Cores', which are designed specifically to deliver up to 12 times higher TFLOPs for Deep Learning applications.

When it comes to memory, Nvidia has opted to go with Samsung's HBM2 modules, combined with a next generation memory controller in Volta. This combination provides 1.5 times more memory bandwidth when compared to the GP100. Volta's HBM2 implementation is also said to be around 95 percent more efficient when running under certain workloads.

Here are the peak computation units for the Tesla V100:

  • 7.5 TFLOP/s of double precision floating-point (FP64) performance;
  • 15 TFLOP/s of single precision (FP32) performance;
  • 120 Tensor TFLOP/s of mixed-precision matrix-multiply-and-accumulate.

And finally, here is a table going over the full V100 spec compared to the last few generations of Tesla flagships.

Tesla Product Tesla K40 Tesla M40 Tesla P100 Tesla V100
GPU GK110 (Kepler) GM200 (Maxwell) GP100 (Pascal) GV100 (Volta)
SMs 15 24 56 80
TPCs 15 24 28 40
FP32 Cores / SM 192 128 64 64
FP32 Cores / GPU 2880 3072 3584 5120
FP64 Cores / SM 64 4 32 32
FP64 Cores / GPU 960 96 1792 2560
Tensor Cores / SM NA NA NA 8
Tensor Cores / GPU NA NA NA 640
GPU Boost Clock 810/875 MHz 1114 MHz 1480 MHz 1455 MHz
Peak FP32 TFLOP/s* 5.04 6.8 10.6 15
Peak FP64 TFLOP/s* 1.68 2.1 5.3 7.5
Peak Tensor Core TFLOP/s* NA NA NA 120
Texture Units 240 192 224 320
Memory Interface 384-bit GDDR5 384-bit GDDR5 4096-bit HBM2 4096-bit HBM2
Memory Size Up to 12 GB Up to 24 GB 16 GB 16 GB
L2 Cache Size 1536 KB 3072 KB 4096 KB 6144 KB
Shared Memory Size / SM 16 KB/32 KB/48 KB 96 KB 64 KB Configurable up to 96 KB
Register File Size / SM 256 KB 256 KB 256 KB 256KB
Register File Size / GPU 3840 KB 6144 KB 14336 KB 20480 KB
TDP 235 Watts 250 Watts 300 Watts 300 Watts
Transistors 7.1 billion 8 billion 15.3 billion 21.1 billion
GPU Die Size 551 mm² 601 mm² 610 mm² 815 mm²
Manufacturing Process 28 nm 28 nm 16 nm FinFET+ 12 nm FFN

KitGuru Says: Volta is officially here and it seems that Nvidia has made some interesting advancements with this new architecture. This is an interesting first look at what's to come later down the line too, though there will be some differences when Volta comes to the GeForce line, including a change from HBM2 to GDDR6 memory. 

 

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