In a surprise announcement earlier today, NVIDIA has announced its new GPU, the Titan V powered by its newest Volta architecture. The latest GPU uses the same GV100 GPU which was announced earlier this year with the Tesla V100 accelerator. With this latest launch, NVIDIA has finally brought its much powerful Volta architecture to a broader audience, as the GPU will be sold via its website in selected regions. Priced at $2,999, (about Rs. 1,94,500 approximately), the GPU is almost twice as costly as the current gen Titan Xp, but NVIDIA does offer better performance as well.
Since, the latest GPU is a derivation of the commercial Tesla V100, the Titan V retains most of the former’s specifications. So, Apart from the 5120 CUDA cores, you get 640 Tensor cores, which are designed specifically for deep learning scenarios. The major push from NVIDIA with this GPU is to provide a better platform for computational processing and scientific simulation at a consumer level. The company states that the GPU is capable of delivering “110 Teraflops of deep learning horsepower”. Titan V users will also get a free access to NVIDIA’s deep learning and HPC software by signing up for NVIDIA GPU Cloud account for free.
NVIDIA's Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, said, “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. 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.”
The new GPU uses the 12nm FFN high-performance manufacturing process developed by TSMC and customised for NVIDIA. The base clock speed on this beast is 1200MHz and it has a boost clock of 1455MHz. It has 12GB of HBM2 memory at its disposal and has a memory bandwidth of 652.8 GB/s. It is also the first consumer grade GPU from NVIDIA to makes use of HBM2 memory, which is a 3D memory stacking technology. On the outside the GPU shroud looks similar to the Titan Xp, but the colour of the shroud is now golden.
This latest launch now opens up the possibility that we may see a new line of consumer grade GPUs from NVIDIA, powered by its Volta architecture.