Nvidia Unveils Titan V, The World’s Most Powerful GPU

Nvidia has gone back to its roots and released what it claims is the world’s most powerful graphics card ever created for the PC.

Called the Titan V, it combines Nvidia supercomputing GPU architecture and is designed to deliver the sheer horsepower needed for computational processing for scientific simulations.

It comes as Nvidia expands beyond its traditional GPU heritage and into new areas such as driverless cars, artificial intelligence, and even virtual reality.

Supercomputing Power

According to Nvidia, the Titan V utilises the firm’s advanced GPU architecture (Nvidia Volta) and 21.1 billion transistors deliver 110 teraflops of deep learning horsepower for the scientific and research community. This is nine times the power of its predecessor.

Nvidia also claims the GPU is very energy efficient.

“Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links.”

“With Titan V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world,” he added. “I can’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.”

Indeed, Nvidia grandly claims its supercomputing GPU architecture is now available for the PC with this GPU, as the Volta architecture features a major redesign of the streaming multiprocessor that is at the centre of the GPU.

“New Tensor Cores designed specifically for deep learning deliver up to 9x higher peak teraflops,” said the firm. “With independent parallel integer and floating-point data paths, Volta is also much more efficient on workloads with a mix of computation and addressing calculations. Its new combined L1 data cache and shared memory unit significantly improve performance while also simplifying programming.”

Available Now

Nvidia has fabricated the Titan V on a new TSMC 12-nanometer FFN high-performance manufacturing process, and it also incorporates Volta’s 12GB HBM2 memory subsystem for advanced memory bandwidth utilisation.

And users of the Titan V will be able to immediately access the latest GPU-optimised AI, deep learning and HPC software by signing up at no charge for an NVIDIA GPU Cloud account.

The Titan V is available immediately, but comes in at a hefty price tag of $2,999 (£2,229).

Earlier this year, Nvidia introduced the Jetson TX2, a credit-card sized supercomputer aimed a powering artificial intelligence (AI) development.

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