Back in April, at GTC (Nvidia’s own GPU Technology Conference), Nvidia announced its Tesla P100 graphics card. At the time, it came with only an NVLink interconnect. Now, for the first day of ISC 2016, Nvidia announced the PCI-Express variant of the Tesla P100.
This card is based on the same Pascal GPU as the NVLink P100, packing 15.3 billion transistors made with the 16 nm FinFET manufacturing process and of course with HBM2 memory. The GP100 aboard is a huge GPU that measures 610 square mm.
However, the PCI-Express variant of the P100 operates a little slower than the previously-announced NVLink variant. Due to TDP restrictions in PCI-Express environments, Nvidia had to lower the power levels down to 250 W from 300 W, which it accomplished by lowering the GPU clocks from a boost clock of 1480 MHz down to 1300 MHz.
The result is that, according to Nvidia, performance measures 18.7 teraflops for half-precision (what much of Deep Learning is done at), 9.3 teraflops for single-precision, and 4.7 teraflops for double-precision -- a tad below the NVLink variant, but still far beyond what any other card can offer over PCI-Express.
In context, the NVLink P100 is therefore meant for large-scale applications, whereas the PCI-Express variant is meant to be used in workstations for smaller-scale workloads--which is still ideal for Deep Learning.
Whereas the NVlink P100 came with 16 GB of HBM2 memory only, the PCI-Express variant comes with either that, or for less memory-intensive applications, a 12 GB variant that delivers 540 GB/s memory bandwidth rather than 720 GB/s.
Availability for the cards in systems is slated for Q4 2016.
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