Nvidia Doubles Down on AI Supercomputing

Nvidia has outpaced itself with so many new GPUs for large-scale computing over the last several years that the strategy now seems to be to leave some near-term capability aside to allow big releases at the expected time of year. In today's case that timing is around the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC20) and while there is not something entirely new to marvel at GPU-wise, there is definite doubling of capacity and capability. The GPU maker announced that its A100 GPUs are capable of literally double the memory and performance with the addition of 80GB HBM2e devices, already shipped to some of its biggest HPC "Superpod" and in their DGX systems with wider availability via their partner network beginning in January 2021. For those partners, the overhead is simple, the capability and capacity jump adds another option without any overhead for the 400W of the 40GB GPUs and for the early Superpod customers, it's a simple tray shift, according to Paresh Kharya, Senior Director of Product Management at Nvidia. Having something new to announce is one thing, but it is probably more likely that without some delays, the original A100 might have had the 80GB of memory already.