It seems like Nvidia announces the fastest GPU in
history multiple times a year, and that’s exactly what’s happened again
today; the Titan V is “the most powerful PC GPU ever created,” in
Nvidia's words. It represents a more significant leap than most products
that have made that claim, however, as it's the first consumer-grade
GPU based around Nvidia’s new Volta architecture.
That said, a liberal definition of the word “consumer” is
in order here — the Titan V sells for $2,999 and is focused around AI
and scientific simulation processing. Nvidia claims up to 110 teraflops
of performance from its 21.1 billion transistors, with 12GB of HBM2
memory, 5120 CUDA cores, and 640 “tensor cores” that are said to offer
up to 9 times the deep-learning performance of its predecessor.
Also it comes in gold and black, which looks pretty cool.
“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,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang says in a
statement. “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.”
There’s no word on when Volta might make its way into
more attainable gaming-focused GPUs. Nvidia’s current Pascal
architecture was introduced over a year and a half ago with the GTX
1080, which still remains one of the best gaming GPUs available — only
really topped in performance by its turbocharged successor, the GTX 1080
Ti. Volta GPUs will be a lot more expensive for Nvidia to produce, so
the company may want to ride out the Pascal wave as long as it can.
The Titan V is available today and is limited to two per customer.
