The Nvidia Hopper H100 literally costs a year’s salary but can’t even be used for gaming. What kind of GPU is this exactly?
Everyone with at least an average annual income pay attention, because Nvidia has something delicious for you. Through the Japanese webshop GDep Advance the price of the Nvidia Hopper H100 with 80GB of RAM has been announced: over €34,500! And for that you get a video card that you can’t even play with!
What is the Nvidia Hopper H100?
Nvidia releases a new series of video cards with the Hopper architecture with a specific purpose: data centers. At first glance, these look the same as ‘normal’ GPUs, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Data center cards are completely specialized to perform unprecedented computational tasks. You can tell by the amount of working memory alone. The Nvidia Hopper H100 has 80GB, quickly 8 times the RAM of an average high-end gaming GPU.
Also in terms of computing power, the data center GPUs are an unprecedented advance on ordinary cards. Compare yourself. An advanced gaming GPU has a processing power of between 20 and 30 teraflops (FP16, but forget that right away). The H100 has 800 teraflops!
Purpose of the GPU
In short, a world of difference and you can see that in the price. But who would buy such a thing? A hobbyist will not easily spend an annual salary on one video card. These types of cards are really meant for professional use.
The Nvidia Hopper H100 is designed to do very advanced calculations. Think of AI applications, cloud computing and calculating trillions of polygons. Compared to these applications, video games are surprisingly simple.
At the same time, a card like the H100 doesn’t have that many connections and is not made to handle games at all. The card runs on a very low power supply as it is meant to be on day and night. For the same reason, the clock speed is also relatively low.
In short, unless you want to develop your own AI or simulate unprecedentedly complex scenes, the Hopper H100 is probably not for you.