NVIDIA Loses The AI Performance Crown, At Least For Now

For decades, CPU vendors would leapfrog each other running benchmarks such as SPEC and TPC, with Intel, SUN SPARC, DEC Alpha, MIPS, and IBM POWER showing off the latest silicon. However the AI accelerator race has been a one-company story since the beginning, with NVIDIA far in front of a small pack of earnest wannabe's. With MLPerf 2.0, that has all changed. In a game of leapfrog, the winner is often determined by the timing of the comparison; we expect the next-gen Hopper GPU will retake the crown, but this time will not keep it. If you are tight for time, we suggest you skip the analyses and jump to the section on software near the end; that's where this battle will be won or lost.