NVIDIA Volta Release Date, Specs, Features, Latest News: NVIDIA Unveils Tesla V100
After NVIDIA released the high-performance GTX 1080 Ti, the rumor mill churned out a lot of speculations over the upcoming launch of the company's new graphics cards based on the next generation graphics processing unit (GPU), which was given the codename Volta.
Rumors about the NVIDIA Volta graphic cards have been buzzing since a couple of years, but at the company's GPU Tech Conference held this month, NVIDIA finally unveiled the first chip based on the new Volta architecture — the Tesla V100.
According to Ars Technica, the Tesla V100 is similar with the Pascal-based P100 because they are both designed for high-performance computing rather than consumer use. And while this particular graphics card may be uninteresting to gamers, the Tesla V100 provides a glimpse at what the future might hold for the tech company's consumer graphics cards.
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Volta is based on a significantly different architecture from Pascal. The V100 chip is made on TSMC's 12nm Fin-FET manufacturing process and is packed with as much as 21.1 billion transistors on an 815mm² die. In contract, the P100 only comes with 15.3 billion transistors on a 610mm² die, while the latest Titan XP is equipped with only 12 billion transistors on 471mm².
Hence, this makes the Tesla V100 a powerful GPU as well as one of the largest silicon chips to have ever been produced.
The combination of die size and process shrink has allowed NVIDIA to push the number of streaming multiprocessors (SMs) to as many as 84, and each of these SMs feature 64 compute unified device architecture (CUDA) cores that total to 5,376. However, the V100 is not a fully enabled part, which means only 80 SMs enabled, resulting to a lesser 5,120 CUDA cores.
The Tesla V100 will first appear inside NVIDIA's computer servers. Eight of them will be inserted inside the $150,000-worth DGC-1 rack-mounted server, which is set to ship in the third quarter of 2017.
A 250W PCIe slot version of the V100 is also reportedly in the works, including a half-weight 150W card which is expected to have a lower clock speed and disabled cores.
