A Closer Look At NVIDIA Volta

NVIDIA’s next gen GPU architecture is all set to leapfrog all expectations.

- Mithun Mohandas

Pascal was one of the biggest leaps in gaming performance that NVIDIA had achieved in recent years. Maxwell was quite the game changer as well, but nowhere close to what Pascal achieved. However, Volta, NVIDIA’s next GPU architecture which will succeed Pascal, seems to be all set to clobber Pascal. At the recent GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the first card to be built using the Volta microarchitecture, the Tesla V100. Going by the Tesla moniker in the name, you should have guessed that this is no gaming graphics card, and you’re right. The GeForce branded GTX 2080, GTX 2070 will be coming out much later. We can expect them in the first half of 2018. Meanwhile, we can take a closer look at Volta.

TESLA V100 : BUILT FOR MACHINE LEARNING AND HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING

Tesla cards are increasingly being deployed by not only Universities that have need for HPC clusters but even up and coming startups operating in the Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning domain. It’s this very domain that has posed some unique challenges with respect to the kind of compute tasks that Tesla cards have to handle. And to meet the ridiculously growing needs of High Performance Computing, the Tesla V100 has incorporated an entirely new component in the GPU die, Tensor Cores.