Nvidia’s H100 GPU is among the many hottest merchandise the tech big has launched lately, albeit with some notable pricing issues and prolonged delays on orders.
Fortunately, there are more economical alternate options that prospects might not be conscious of – particularly the L40S sequence.
This highly effective sibling GPU to the H100 presents twice the reminiscence and is a less expensive choice for these with out the monetary clout to spend money on the extra pricier vary.
“Fascinating” H100 different
Similar to its H100 and A100 counterparts, the L40S GPU is constructed particularly to energy the following technology of knowledge heart workloads within the age of AI, able to dealing with the extraordinary pressures of generative AI and LLM inferencing and hefty 3D graphics workloads.
Serve The Dwelling managed to get its fingers on an L40S and sang its praises, dubbing it a “fascinating” and cheaper different to the H100.
“The L40S is one thing fairly totally different. Nvidia took the bottom L40, a knowledge heart visualization GPU utilizing Nvidia’s latest Ada Lovelace structure, and adjusted the tunings in order that it was tuned extra for AI slightly than visualization,” the publication mentioned.
The L40S nonetheless boasts typical options present in its predecessor, the L40, reminiscent of ray tracing cores, DisplayPort outputs, and NVENC/NVDEC with AV1 help.
Nevertheless, on this occasion, extra energy is allotted towards the AI parts of the GPU, making it a robust piece of package for coaching fashions on a funds.
The L40S has far much less reminiscence capability than the A100, which is a notable draw back to this sequence. Nevertheless, what it lacks in dimension it makes up for in efficiency.
The GPU helps each the Nvidia Transformer Engine and FP8, which means that it will possibly considerably cut back the scale of knowledge and requires much less reminiscence bandwidth.
Metrics from Nvidia present the GPU presents tensor efficiency of as much as 1,466 teraflops alongside a powerful RT core efficiency of 212 teraflops.
Nvidia L40S: A value efficient different
Price, naturally, is a key promoting level for the L40S. At present charges, the H100 is round 2.6x the worth of the GPU, making it a far cheaper choice.
Availability can also be one other notable benefit. H100 GPUs have confirmed immensely standard since launch, making them arduous to get ahold of.
Being a extra obscure and fewer well-known GPU means the L40S is extra simply accessible with out prolonged waits.
