110 teraflops of computing power
The Volta architecture was announced earlier this year but has so far been reserved for NVIDIA’s Tesla datacentre compute cards. Late last week, the company brought Volta to workstations with its new gold-coloured TITAN V. The card’s said to be twice as efficient as its predecessor with up to 9x higher peak teraflop performance in deep learning applications.
The TITAN V uses a 12-nanometre FFN die built by TSMC to NVIDIA’s customised specification. It has 12GB of HBM2 memory optimised for advanced bandwidth utilisation. Over 21.1 transistors are added in the manufacturing process, giving the TITAN V an impressive 110 teraflops of raw computing power. Output options consist of NVIDIA’s standard three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI.
READ NEXT: IBM launches new POWER9 servers designed for AI
All this translates to machine learning performance that NVIDIA claims is the best available for workstation PCs. The card’s oriented towards developers who frequently work with AI and high-performance computing. TITAN promises to offer a faster and more efficient workflow, enabling developers to iterate more quickly without waiting for their hardware to catch-up.
“Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI. We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. “With TITAN V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world. I can’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.”
Built for professionals
As AI and machine learning become more widespread, demand is growing for hardware designed around neural networks. It’s a market NVIDIA has come to dominate and the TITAN V is its latest effort to attract sales from AI developers. The company’s moving away from its previous core audience of gamers as it focuses on emerging compute technologies.
Unlike the existing Volta-powered Tesla cards, the TITAN V is a fully-functioning graphics card that’s compatible with consumer-grade PC hardware. NVIDIA’s not targeting it at gamers though, hence the lack of GeForce branding.
With pricing set at $3,000 and optimisation concentrated on AI applications, the new TITAN targets professionals looking for raw computing power rather than graphical prowess. NVIDIA’s gaming line-up will continue to be powered by its older Pascal architecture, although there’s nothing to stop deep-pocketed gamers buying a TITAN V for their new rig.
