NVIDIA launches Volta GPU platform for AI and high-performance computing

NVIDIA has announced today what it claims to be the world’s most powerful GPU computing architecture designed for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, the Volta GPU platform, and its first Volta-based processor, NVIDIA Tesla V100 data center GPU.

The Volta GPU platform is a seventh-generation GPU architecture, built with 21 billion transistors and delivers the equivalent performance of 100 CPUs for deep learning. It provides a 5x improvement over Pascal in peak teraflops, and 15x over the Maxwell architecture from two years ago.

NVIDIA also announced its first Volta-based processor, the NVIDIA Tesla V100 data center GPU, boasting 640 Tensor Cores and can deliver 120 teraflops of deep learning performance.

NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU Features:
• Tensor Cores designed to speed AI workloads. Equipped with 640 Tensor Cores, V100 delivers 120 teraflops of deep learning performance, equivalent to the performance of 100 CPUs.
• New GPU architecture with over 21 billion transistors. It pairs CUDA cores and Tensor Cores within a unified architecture, providing the performance of an AI supercomputer in a single GPU.
• NVLink™ provides the next generation of high-speed interconnect linking GPUs, and GPUs to CPUs, with up to 2x the throughput of the prior generation NVLink.
• 900 GB/sec HBM2 DRAM, developed in collaboration with Samsung, achieves 50 percent more memory bandwidth than previous generation GPUs, essential to support the extraordinary computing throughput of Volta.
• Volta-optimized software, including CUDA, cuDNN and TensorRT™ software, which leading frameworks and applications can easily tap into to accelerate AI and research.

“Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest technology advances in human history,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, who unveiled Volta at his GTC keynote. “It will automate intelligence and spur a wave of social progress unmatched since the industrial revolution.