US GPU giant Nvidia is making a huge play this week. The Santa Clara-based company announced its first consumer-grade GPU (graphics processing unit) aimed at AI and machine learning. The new Titan V was unveiled at this year’s Neural Information Processing systems conference in Long Beach, California.
According to The Verge, the Santa Clara-based company announced its first ever consumer-grade PC GPU, the Nvidia Titan V. The new GPU, which is based on new Volta architecture, offers a huge significant leap than any other Nvidia’s products. The company described it as the most powerful PC GPU ever created.
In a recent press release, Nvidia claimed that the new GPU card offers much better computing performance than its predecessor the Pascal-based Titan X.
What the new GPU will bring to the market
As mentioned earlier by ArsTechnica, the new graphics card does also some great video outputs, however, its intended for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The new Nvidia card also boasts an awesome computational performance, 13.8 trillion single precision floating point operations per second along with 10 reduced precision machine learning TFLOPS and 6.9 double precision TFLOPS.
The new GPU card offers lots of similarities with the Nvidia Tesla V100. It comes with new machine learning-focused tensor cores, 5,120 CUDA cores, and also specialize in 4x4 matrix arithmetic.
However, the exact clock speeds for the Tesla V100 is still unknown, while the new Titan V can hit a whopping 1.455 GHz.
The big difference lies in the memory subsystem. In comparison, the Tesla V100 has about 16 GB of HBM2 (second-generation high bandwidth) memory and 4,096-bit bus, while the new card comes with 12 GB of HBM2 memory along with a 3,072-bit memory bus.
The Titan V’s memory is a little bit slower compared to Tesla V100. It’s clocked at 1.70 Gb/s compared to Tesla’s 1.75 Gb/s. But unlike the Tesla V100, the new Titan V uses standard GeForce driver stack with three DisplayPort and one HDMI outputs. And more importantly, it can play games well.
as for the availability and pricing, the Titan V is currently available on the limited number only, two per customer.
Customers can buy it online for $2,999.
Overall, Nvidia’s latest GPU targets developers who use PCs to do extensive work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and even high-performance computing (HPC). Scientists, researchers, and developers require a massive amount of memory bandwidth to do most of the "heavy lifting". Now with the Titan V installed in their desktop PCs, there’s no need for a special or dedicated storage to meet their computing requirements.
Other Nvidia-related stories
The Santa Clara-based company announced its latest salvo in the VR gaming market, the all-new GeForce 388.59 WHQL drivers. While the GPU company doesn’t bring any special to the new Volta-based Titan V, it gaming enhancements to "Fallout 4" VR gaming.
According to PC Gamer, the new GeForce driver offers a relatively minor update. It mainly addresses a flickering issue that plagued some G-Sync laptops with GeForce GTX 1080 GPU cards.
