Evaluating NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU Excels in AI and Graphics Tasks?
Nvidia in past year released their new series of GPUs, Ada Lovelace L40S. This new GPU is optimized for AI and graphics performance in the data center. L40S delivers exceptional power and efficiency for enterprises aiming to integrate AI into their workflows, supporting applications from chatbots to generative art and AI-enhanced solutions
This series has gained a lot of attention recently after A100 shortage in market.
The new NVIDIA L40S, based on the ‘Ada Lovelace architecture’, is a real powerhouse for AI and graphics tasks in the datacenter. Packed with a brand-new streaming multiprocessor, 4th-gen Tensor Cores, and 3rd-gen RT Cores, it’s got all the bells and whistles for top-notch performance. It can achieve 91.6 teraFLOPS of FP32 performance and sporting a large L2 cache, it’s designed to be both efficient and powerful.
Lots of A100 buyers are now eyeing the L40S as the perfect pick, even if they’re not worrying about wait times for other GPUs
Comparing the NVIDIA L40S GPU to the A100
The NVIDIA L40S GPU is an improved version of the NVIDIA L40 GPU, made for handling graphics and large scale simulations in data centers.
This GPU is strong and can handle many different tasks well. It speeds up a wide range of AI and graphics jobs.
Whether it’s doing math for AI, running deep learning programs, or handling graphics-heavy tasks, the L40S GPU often works better than the A100.
Price:
L40S — 9 to10k$
A100 — 13 to 15k$
Let’s see how its specs stack up against NVIDIA’s A100
The L40S performs much better for F32 and TF32 tasks, but it’s not as good at double-precision operations because it has less VRAM.
It has a bit more VRAM than the PCIE A100, but not as much as the SXM4 A100.
That’s a only point where L40S lacks compared to A100.
Advantages over A100:
Best option for general-purpose computing: The L40S GPU offers significantly better general-purpose performance than the NVIDIA A100 GPUs, with 4.5 times the FP32 capability and 18,176 CUDA cores. Servers using the L40S GPU provide exceptional HPC performance, enabling users to handle workloads ranging from complex molecular dynamics simulations, like those done with AMBER and CHARMM, to intensive AI training, or even both!
Superlative Next-Generation Graphics: The NVIDIA L40S GPU features 142 third-generation RT Cores and 48GB of GDDR6 memory, delivering outstanding graphics performance. Equipping a system with four or eight L40S GPUs can tackle high-polygon 3D models, run CFD simulations, render intricately textured ray-traced environments, and manage any other data-intensive workloads.
Superior Gen-AI Performance: The L40S GPU is particularly effective for generative AI operations due to its enhanced FP16 capabilities. With support for FP16 precision, it can process large AI models more efficiently, enabling faster training times and more accurate results for generative AI applications, such as text generation, image synthesis, and complex data modeling.”
Outstanding AI Performance: The L40S GPU surpasses the A100 GPU in FP32 Tensor Core performance by about 50 TFLOPS. It includes the NVIDIA Hopper architecture Transformer Engine and can compute on FP8 and hybrid floating point precision. An eight L40S GPU setup can perform AI training and inference up to 1.7x and 1.5x faster, respectively, than the previous generation eight-NVIDIA HGX A100 GPU system. The L40S GPU excels in AI tasks such as image processing, data aggregation, and generative AI.
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L40S is a really great GPU, and GPUnet wants to get a bunch of them stacked up. We anticipate strong interest from AI startups looking for top-notch performance.
More details will be announced soon :)
