The king of the GRID cards – accept no substitute! The V100 uses the Volta GPU architecture, Volta succeeded the Pascal GPU architecture but has since been succeeded by Turing so it’s not quite bleeding edge but is an order of magnitude more powerful that Pascal GPU’s.

The V100 when it was originally released the V100 only had 16GB but now is also available with 32GB of Frame Buffer and is unsurpassed for raw GPU power in the vGPU space with its single GPU having 5120 CUDA cores and 640 Tensor cores to boost performance, the RT technology that Turing has wasn’t part of the Volta generation but this GRID card is not for the kids! The V100 also surpasses the P40 in being able to allocate 32GB of vGPU to a single workload, not something you see every day but if you need it the V100 can do it.

The V100 excels at running HPC workloads and although it supports vGPU I have not come across any implementations of EUC workloads that would use the Volta, it’s cost and the cost of the associated CPU’s you would need to take advantage of its capabilities make such implementations the stuff of legend – I’m not saying they aren’t out there and I’d love to get my hands on one!

So what is the V100 best for? I have touched upon HPC – AI is a phrase on everybody’s lips currently and that too is within the V100’s remit as is running very demanding graphical workloads.

The V100 is also available with the new SXM2 mezzanine connector, what that’s for I’ll discuss more below.

Cost comparison

So, what do these things cost? As you can imagine they are not cheap but having your CAD engineers no longer tethered to that beastly graphics workstation in the office offers numerous benefits, perhaps the workstation will still be used for anything requiring the huge monitors that CAD engineers need, but the ability to work on their projects remotely or when mobile can revolutionise businesses by accelerating the Sales cycle for example.

I’m a techie – so always take anything I say around cost with a pinch of salt, the costs below are RRP and do not necessarily represent what you would actually pay – but they give an idea of comparative costs for each of the cards.

I have also worked out roughly the cost to assign a user a 1GB vGPU profile – note that this excludes nVidia GRID licensing.