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Nvidia’s Volta GPU hits the desktop with the next-gen Titan V

Happy Christmas, says Jen-Hsun Claus, introducing the first desktop spin of the Nvidia Volta architecture, the new Titan V.

Nvidia Titan V

Happy Christmas, says Jen-Hsun Claus, introducing the first desktop spin of the Nvidia Volta architecture, the new Titan V. Again Nvidia have introduced the world’s fastest graphics card, beating their own GPUs once more. The kicker? Well, you’re going to have to drop $3,000 if you want one in your rig.

Want to know about GPUs you actually might be able to afford? Check out our pick of the best graphics cards.

The Nvidia Titan V is a 21.1 billion transistor graphics card, which Jen-Hsun has said is capable of delivering 110 teraflops of computing power, which puts it nine times faster than the previous laggardly Titan.

“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,”​ ​said​ ​CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference.​ ​“With​ ​TITAN​ ​V,​ ​we​ ​are​ ​putting​ ​Volta​ ​into​ ​the hands​ ​of​ ​researchers​ ​and​ ​scientists​ ​all​ ​over​ ​the​ ​world.​ ​I​ ​can’t​ ​wait​ ​to​ ​see​ ​their​ ​breakthrough discoveries.”

Nvidia Titan V intro

Sooo, it’s not exactly a gaming card… This is high-performance graphics silicon designed for the massive parallel processing demands of modern machine learning and inference applications.

In terms of specs there isn’t a lot of difference between this Titan Volta and the Tesla V100 Nvidia have been jamming into supercomputers this year. It’s got a little less HBM2 memory, at 12GB, and a good chunk less memory bandwidth, but there’s the same 5,120 redesigned Volta CUDA cores at its heart.

Essentially then, this is serious AI supercomputer territory for what is actually an incredible price for such a powerful a professional GPU.

But this is an unprecedented release. Traditionally the Titan of a new GPU generation has arrived after the standard desktop versions of the architecture have been launched. What that means for the desktop Nvidia Volta graphics silicon we don’t know. It could either mean Volta is all ready for the desktop early next year, or that gaming Volta cards are going to very different beasts to the GPUs we’ve seen so far.

Can’t wait to find out.