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The higher power requirements of datacenter GPUs are mostly from running hardware well past a reasonable point on the efficiency curve to eke slightly higher ge
by ryao 1y ago
The higher power requirements of datacenter GPUs are mostly from running hardware well past a reasonable point on the efficiency curve to eke slightly higher generational increases in performance. Nvidia for example has three versions of the RTX PRO 6000. One runs at 600W while the other two run at 300W. The main differences are the power target and the cooling solutions. If I recall correctly, the performance difference between them is less than 20%, despite a 50% reduction in power consumption, for what is effectively the same hardware. This can be confirmed by changing the power target of the 600W version to 300W and benchmarking the before and after. Plenty of people have made similar observations of AMD’s hardware.
That said, I am confident that Nvidia will continue serve those of us who want our own hardware.
- latchkey 1y agoThey all bin their chips after testing. 355x is 35% faster than 300x and uses almost 2x more power. But 355 has fp4/6 added in, which until udma comes out, likely won’t get emulated. It is fine if you dont need the features of newer hardware, but if you do… then desktop won’t help you.
- ryao 1y agoYour comment does not make much sense to me. The 355x and 300x are two different chips, not binned versions of one another. The RTX PRO 6000 has fp4/fp6 support too, so there is no need to use datacenter exclusive hardware to get that.
- latchkey 1y agoI wasn’t referring to them being binned to each other. Oh nice, I didn’t know that about the 6k.
- ryao 1y agoThe consumer 50 series GPUs also have FP4/FP6 support. Nvidia talks about it a little here: https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/Solutions/geforce/blackwell/nvidia-rtx-blackwell-gpu-architecture.pdf https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/Solutions/geforce/blackwel... FP4 is given a full page advertising it while FP6 support in “RTX Blackwell” is a footnote.