SambaNova says its chips beat Nvidia's A100 on performance

SambaNova says its latest chips can best Nvidia's A100 silicon by a wide margin, at least when it comes to machine learning workloads. The Palo Alto-based AI startup this week revealed its DataScale systems and Cardinal SN30 accelerator, which the company claims is capable of delivering 688 TFLOPS of BF16 performance, twice that of Nvidia's A100. However, in machine learning training workloads, SambaNova says the gap is even larger. The company claims its SN30-based DataScale systems are six times faster when training a 13-billion parameter GPT model than Nvidia's DGX A100 servers, at least according to its internal benchmarks, so take them with a healthy dose of salt. The SN30 is manufactured on a 7nm TSMC process node, which packs 86 billion transistors into a single die.