Ampere (microarchitecture)


Ampere is the codename for a graphics processing unit microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Volta architecture, officially announced on May 14, 2020. It is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère. It is unknown whether Ampere will be featured in Nvidia's expected GeForce RTX 30 family of cards which may be released in Q4 2020.

Details

Architectural improvements of the Ampere architecture include the following:
Announced and released on May 14, 2020 was the Ampere-based A100 accelerator. The A100 features 19.5 teraflops of FP32 performance, 6912 CUDA cores, 40GB of graphics memory, and 1.6TB/s of graphics memory bandwidth. The A100 accelerator was initially available only in the 3rd generation of DGX server, including 8 A100s. Also included in the DGX A100 is 15TB of PCIe gen 4 NVMe storage, two 64-core AMD Rome 7742 CPUs, 1 TB of RAM, and Mellanox-powered HDR InfiniBand interconnect. The initial price for the DGX A100 was $199,000.
Comparison of accelerators used in DGX:
! Architecture !! FP32 CUDA Cores !! Boost Clock !! Memory Clock !! Memory Bus Width !! Memory Bandwidth !! VRAM !! Single Precision !! Double Precision !! INT8 Tensor !! FP16 Tensor !! bfloat16 Tensor !! TensorFloat-32 Tensor !! FP64 Tensor !! Interconnect !! GPU !! GPU Die Size !! Transistor Count !! TDP !! Manufacturing Process