NVIDIA Unveils & Gives Away New Limited Edition 32GB Titan V "CEO Edition"
by Ryan Smith on June 21, 2018 7:30 AM ESTNVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang has over the years become increasingly known for his giveaway antics at AI conferences. In recent years the CEO has unveiled both the NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) and the NVIDIA Titan V in this fashion. And now you can add one more reveal to this list, as last evening Huang gave out 20 units of a new Titan V SKU, the Titan V CEO Edition, at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City.
According to NVIDIA, the aptly named SKU is apparently a “limited edition” product, and unlike past Huang reveals, NVIDIA has not sent out any announcements of a new product. So for the moment, this is not a retail product and is not immediately expected to become one. None the less, this is an unusual development as the new Titan V SKU is not simply a Titan V with additional memory, but rather has some notable configuration differences that set it apart from the regular Titan V.
NVIDIA Compute Accelerator Specification Comparison | ||||||
Titan V CEO Edition |
Titan V | Tesla V100 (PCIe) |
Titan Xp | |||
CUDA Cores | 5120? | 5120 | 5120 | 3840 | ||
Tensor Cores | 640? | 640 | 640 | N/A | ||
ROPs | 128 | 96 | 128 | 96 | ||
Core Clock | 1200MHz? | 1200MHz | ? | 1485MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1455MHz? | 1455MHz | 1370MHz | 1582MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 1.7Gbps HBM2? | 1.7Gbps HBM2 | 1.75Gbps HBM2 | 11.4Gbps GDDR5X | ||
Memory Bus Width | 4096-bit | 3072-bit | 4096-bit | 384-bit | ||
Memory Bandwidth | 900GB/sec? | 653GB/sec | 900GB/sec | 547GB/sec | ||
VRAM | 32GB | 12GB | 16GB | 12GB | ||
L2 Cache | 6MB | 4.5MB | 6MB | 3MB | ||
Single Precision | 13.8 TFLOPS | 13.8 TFLOPS | 14 TFLOPS | 12.1 TFLOPS | ||
Double Precision | 6.9 TFLOPS (1/2 rate) |
6.9 TFLOPS (1/2 rate) |
7 TFLOPS (1/2 rate) |
0.38 TFLOPS (1/32 rate) |
||
Tensor Performance (Deep Learning) |
125 TFLOPS | 110 TFLOPS | 112 TFLOPS | N/A | ||
GPU | GV100 (815mm2) |
GV100 (815mm2) |
GV100 (815mm2) |
GP102 (471mm2) |
||
Transistor Count | 21.1B | 21.1B | 21.1B | 12B | ||
TDP | 250W? | 250W | 250W | 250W | ||
Form Factor | PCIe | PCIe | PCIe | PCIe | ||
Cooling | Active | Active | Passive | Active | ||
Manufacturing Process | TSMC 12nm FFN | TSMC 12nm FFN | TSMC 12nm FFN | TSMC 16nm FinFET | ||
Architecture | Volta | Volta | Volta | Pascal | ||
Launch Date | 6/20/2018 | 12/07/2017 | Q3'17 | 04/07/2017 | ||
Price | N/A | $2999 | ~$10000 | $1299 |
Because this isn’t a retail SKU – at least not yet – NVIDIA hasn’t published official specifications for the card, so most of our table above is pending confirmation. However based solely on the 32GB VRAM capacity, we can accurately infer two very important points.
- NVIDIA is using new 8-Hi HBM2 memory stacks, as with their 32GB Tesla cards
- Titan V CEO Edition has all 4 of its ROP/Memory Controller partitions enabled, up from 3 on the retail Titan V
It’s the latter point in particular that has some potentially significant ramifications for NVIDIA’s limited edition Titan V SKU. The standard Titan V itself is a salvage part with only 3 ROP/MC partitions enabled; consequently it only has 3/4ths of the memory bandwidth, pixel throughput, and L2 cache of its fully-enabled sibling. This has helped to differentiate the relatively cheap Titan V from the more expensive Tesla V100, with NVIDIA being able to leverage the memory capacity and memory bandwidth differences to ensure their flagship card remains attractive.
The end result is that the Titan V CEO Edition is not just a Titan V with more memory. In fact memory capacity aside, thanks to these changes there will almost certainly be meaningful (though not necessarily large) performance differences between it and the regular Titan V in any kind of memory bandwidth-bound scenario. And from I’ve heard from Titan V users over the past year, bandwidth-bound scenarios are more common than one might think, as the regular Titan V can fully saturate its memory bandwidth on compute alone and still come up short. Equally important, this means that at least on paper, there’s not much separating the new SKU from the 32GB Tesla V100 in terms of performance.
As an added wrinkle, of the handful of specifications that NVIDIA’s blog post does cover, they list the new card as offering 125 TFLOPS of tensor core performance, whereas the retail Titan V is 110 TFLOPS. It’s not clear how NVIDIA gets this number, but importantly, it means that there may be further clockspeed or SM configuration changes that have yet to be revealed by NVIDIA.
In any case, for the time being the only way to get this unexpected Titan V SKU is to get one of the 20 winners from NVIDIA’s giveaway to part with one. So the immediate impact to NVIDIA’s business – or to potential Titan buyers – is negligible. However given the fact that this is not just a Titan V with more memory, it does strike me as unusual that NVIDIA would produce a small batch of cards and then just stop, as someone just created a fair bit of extra work for NVIDIA driver & validation teams. So I wouldn’t at all be surprised if we see a similar SKU hit retail down the line, especially as the Titan V is the only remaining commercial GV100 product that doesn’t have a second, higher memory capacity configuration.
Source: NVIDIA (via SH SOTN)
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mode_13h - Friday, June 22, 2018 - link
Don't blame Nvidia. Maximizing profit is simply their nature. It'd be like blaming a hungry tiger for eating a small child.Rather, blame AMD for not releasing any new GPUs this year...
Alexvrb - Saturday, June 23, 2018 - link
Neither one of them is to blame, for this particular cluster. Supply. Demand. Altcoins. It's not sorcery.mode_13h - Sunday, June 24, 2018 - link
I was referring to the rumored launch price of next gen, now that current GPU prices have returned to near-MSRP levels. If they do launch *above* current GPU pricing, there's no justification for that besides greed + lack of competition.I will grant you that the past year might've shown more strength of demand for GPUs at higher price points, and that will only embolden them to further raise launch prices.
Alexvrb - Monday, June 25, 2018 - link
Their last-gen GPUs aren't going to vanish right away. They're going to continue to sell them for a while, and as long as they are selling them, these new GPUs will slot in above them. Even if AMD releases something powerful, it won't substantially impact the market as long as miners are snapping them up.At least the mid-range cards are affordable again. That's all I ever buy anyway.
mode_13h - Friday, June 22, 2018 - link
Does nobody else see that this is merely a Quadro GV100 with a Titan V shroud (and maybe slightly tweaked clocks)?Unless they start selling these for less than the GV100, it's just a publicity stunt.
sunty - Sunday, June 24, 2018 - link
I was expecting a 32GB Titan V. Now that we have an upcoming AMD Vega 20 7nm with 32GB, there will be an data center version (to replace MI25 accelerator at the top end) to compete with Nvidia Tesla V100, and Nvidia Titan V 32GB to go head-to-head with the recently benchmark tests spotted AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 7nm for workstations. The only question is whether the Titan V 32GB will have ECC enabled (disabled ECC on the current 12GB Titan V may have been a potential source of the calculation errors recently reported and a higher 32GB HBM2 might fix that (with or without enabled ECC))sunty - Sunday, June 24, 2018 - link
ok..forgot about the Quadro GV100. So this will be GV100 minus the ECC, the whole point of Titan Vmode_13h - Tuesday, June 26, 2018 - link
Thanks. It's like everybody forgot about the Quadro GV100.Not all Quadro's have ECC, but it seems GV100 does (or so the datasheet claims).