Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU has a lot of untapped potential

[WYP]

More than 15% of this chip has been locked down.



Read more about Nvidia's GA100 GPU core having a lot of untapped potential.

 

[NeverBackDown]

In about 6 months I am sure they will release a nearly fully unlocked SKU.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

That machine that Jensen was in his kitchen with, starts at $200k, I think.

 

[Breit]

Well, the A100 is already at 400W. I suppose at some point this becomes un-coolable as the heat transfer into the cooler is indeed a very real problem. Especially with the given surface area that this chip has due to the high density 7nm process. Sure they can come up with another CEO edition for Ampere this time with highly binned dies and lower voltages, but I doubt a fully enabled chip will be regularly available.

Furthermore, I suspect that they are VERY close to the reticle limit of what TSMC can do with their 7nm process. So yield must be abysmally low for fully functional dies. I'd guess they had this in mind when they designed the A100 die and never intended to release a fully enabled chip and I must admit this is a valid strategy if you want to keep a monolithic die and not go the chiplet-route to keep yields acceptably high.

 

[looz]

Well, the A100 is already at 400W. I suppose at some point this becomes un-coolable as the heat transfer into the cooler is indeed a very real problem. Especially with the given surface area that this chip has due to the high density 7nm process. Sure they can come up with another CEO edition for Ampere this time with highly binned dies and lower voltages, but I doubt a fully enabled chip will be regularly available.

I don't think thermals will be the issue - it's massive like you said. Having 200W on your thumbnail is an issue like we've seen with 9900K, especially with a heatspreader design, but 400W on a massive directly cooled die? Not much of a problem - and water cooled high density servers are a tested technology, and Nvidia decidedly didn't take that route. In addition noise is not a factor in server environment and the air cooling is highly optimized, be it hot aisle for exhaust and whatnot.

If you're wondering how A100 translates to consumers - don't, this is prohibitively expensive to manufacture. They're strictly targeting high density computing.

But yields for a fully-fledged massive die in 7nm must be horrid and such product wouldn't be sensible for any data center to buy - their rack unit is already the densest thing out there by a significant margin.