Nvidia announced its latest Titan V graphic card at the NIPS 2017 conference on Friday. In the words of the company, “Titan V is the most powerful PC GPU ever created,” and is based on the “world’s most advanced GPU architecture – Nvidia Volta.” Through Titan V, Nvidia wants to focus on Artificial Intelligence and deep learning.
Nvidia Titan V – is the price justified?
The Nvidia Titan V graphic card would come with a price tag of $2999. According to the company, it has up to 110 teraflops of performance from its 21.1 billion transistors with 12GB of HBM2 memory, 5120 CUDA cores, and 640 “tensor cores,” making it at least 9 times more efficient in deep learning than its predecessors. Tensor cores are highly specialized processing units that are best for math-suited AI and deep learning, making Nvidia Titan V a compute card first rather than gaming focused.
Announcing the new product, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said, “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, and memory architecture and processor links.”
Further, Huang noted that Volta would be tested by the researchers and scientists across the world, and couldn’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.
Nvidia Tesla V100 products are in huge demand, and the same is expected for the Titan V as well. The price tag of $2999 is quite high, but considering the rare Tesla V100 PCIe card is selling for around $10,000, the price of the new card looks cheaper.
The Nvidia Titan V is now available for purchase, but the quantity is limited to two per customer. As of now, the card would be available only at Nvidia stores. For now, the company has not revealed the gaming performance or any other information related to it.
For AI, deep learning and high-end computing
The Nvidia Titan V marks a new beginning, as it is the first HBM2-equipped prosumer graphics card available for the masses. Instead of SLI fingers, Nvidia has gone with NVLink connections, which can be spotted at the top of the PCB.
Nvidia believes that the Titan V is perfect for developers, who want to make their PCs efficient enough to do work in Artificial Intelligence, deep learning and high-performance computing. Those who opt for Nvidia Titan V will get immediate access to the latest GPU optimized AI, deep learning and HPC software by registering for Nvidia GPU Cloud at no charge. After a user registers, they would get the Nvidia optimized deep learning frameworks, third-party managed HPC applications, Nvidia HPC visualization tools and the Nvidia TensorRT™ inferencing optimizer.
Nvidia has not clarified about when Volta could transform into a more realistic gaming focused GPU. Over a year ago, the company released the Pascal architecture with the GTX 1080, which is one of the most efficient gaming GPUs available. After GTX 1080, came the GTX 1080 Ti, which is even better than its predecessor. Higher cost would be involved in producing the Volta GPU, so the company would not abandon the Pascal architecture anytime soon.
On Thursday, Nvidia shares closed up 1.44% at $191.99. The shares were up in pre-market trading today as well.
