NVIDIA's $3000 TITAN V GPU could turn 'PC into AI supercomputer'

NVIDIA's TITAN V GPU, announced Thursday by CEO Jensen Huang at the NIPS conference, is the most powerful GPU available in the world, and could help transform the PC into an "AI Supercomputer," according to a press release.

The TITAN GPU is built on NVIDIA's Volta architecture, and features 21.1 billion transistors, the release said. The TITAN V can achieve up to 110 teraflops, which is a 9x improvement over its predecessor, the release 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, memory architecture and processor links," Huang said in the release.

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Being that it uses the Volta architecture, the TITAN V is also energy efficient. According to the release, the new architecture is twice as efficient as the previous generation Pascal design, mainly due to a redesign of the streaming multiprocessor.

The machine's processing performance is achieved in part thanks to new Tensor Cores that were optimized specifically for deep learning applications, the release said. Volta's efficiency and a new combined L1 data cache also help drive performance.

As noted, the big value of the TITAN V is its ability to power workloads specialized for AI, deep learning, and high performance computing (HPC). TITAN V users will also get access to GPU-optimized AI, deep learning, and HPC software through an NVIDIA GPU Cloud account for free, according to the release. "This container registry includes NVIDIA-optimized deep learning frameworks, third-party managed HPC applications, NVIDIA HPC visualization tools and the NVIDIA TensorRT inferencing optimizer," the release said.

NVIDIA has long been known as a key player in the video game market with its line of GPUs. However, with GPUs increasingly being used for AI and HPC due to their massively parallel architecture, NVIDIA is seeing quite a bit of growth in its efforts to provide processors for these workloads. In fact, NVIDIA's investment in AI chips pushed its data center business revenue past $500 million for the first time.

The TITAN V GPU is now available for purchase at $2,999 in participating countries.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

NVIDIA announced the TITAN V GPU, the most powerful GPU in the world that offers 110 teraflops of powers, a 9x increase from its predecessor.
The TITAN V is designed for AI, deep learning, and HPC workloads, and could provide the kind of horsepower needed to drive innovation in these efforts.
Users who rely on the $3,000 GPU will also have access to a container registry of deep learning frameworks, apps, and tools for their work.