[littlestymaar]

> The special thing about the V100 is that it's driver EULA allows data center usage.

Wait what? Is it the only thing?

That sounds hard to believe: if true, using the open driver (Nouveau) instead of Nvidia's proprietary one would be a massive money saver for datacenters operators (and even if Nouveau doesn't support the features you'd want already, supporting their development would be much cheaper for a company like Amazon than paying a premium on every GPU they buy)

[rrss]

No, that's not the only thing.

Other characteristics of V100 that may be interesting to people buying GPUs for data centers:

- higher capacity GPU memory. 1080 has 8 GB, V100 has 16 or 32 GB.

- higher bandwidth GPU memory. V100 has HBM2 with a peak of 900 GB/s, 1080 has G5X with a peak of ~300 GB/s.

- ECC support.

- data center certification + warranty

(The geforce warranty covers normal consumer usage, like gaming, and does not cover datacenter use)

- availability of enterprise support contracts.

(If you are buying a ton of GPUs to put in a datacenter, you probably don't want to end up on the normal consumer support line when something goes wrong)

- fast fp64

There are probably others

[Firadeoclus]

A GTX1080 manages about ~9 TFLOPS(fp32) (and has terrible fp16 support), where V100 gets ~15 TFLOPS(fp16), ~30 TFLOPS(fp16), and ~120 TFLOPS(tensor cores).

Apart from one being a gaming product and the other being designed for computational tasks, they're a generation apart and have various small differences that may be quite relevant for individual tasks (such as V100 allowing twice the shared memory - 96 KiB - per thread block)

[littlestymaar]

Thanks, that makes much more sense!

[fsh]

Nouveau does not support CUDA and is therefore not usable for GPU computing on Nvidia.

[YetAnotherNick]

NVIDIA has EULA to prevent data centre use of their hardware. Also, NVIDIA does not allow bulk buying of RTX series.

[alickz]

They barely allow single buying for the 30 series :(

Took me quite a while to get my hands on a 3080.

[jklehm]

What ended up working for you?

[alickz]

I bought from a (relatively) small German commerce site[1] rather than a bigger site like Amazon, OCUK, or Scan. I'm in EU though, probably doesn't help if you're US. I think I paid a €50 or so premium over the retail price but I didn't mind that too much.

I used this[2] site to keep an eye open for stock, as you can see it's pretty much empty now but I just checked every day and finally found one.

[1] https://www.reichelt.de/ [2] https://www.gputracker.eu/en/search/category/1/graphics-card...

[jklehm]

Thanks for the insights...frustrating times to be searching for one.