Major GPU architecture changes only happen every few years. * k80 - 2014, and this really was not that great of a chip. * v100 in 2017, and I'd consider this

Major GPU architecture changes only happen every few years. * k80 - 2014, and this really was not that great of a chip. * v100 in 2017, and I'd consider this the first "built from the ground up" ML chip. * A100 in late 2020, with the first major cloud general availability being in 2021. Even when new chips come out the old ones are still usable- you can rent k80s for fairly cheap on all cloud providers, and have kept a surprising amount of their resale value. The v100s are also very much still in demand. The A100 is also an amazing system- the new nvswitch archetecture means the A100s work together far far better than their V100 counterparts. I was part of an upgrade project setting up an A100 cluster with infiniband and it really is amazing how well these chips work together. That communication barrier was a pretty obvious next step though (the k80s had crap intergpu communication, the v100s introduced the nvlink, and the nvswitch was the obvious way to go). There isn't an obvious next step, and I imagine the A100s to be the standard for at least the next four years (with lots of continued use after that).