If you thought the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti was expensive, then allow me to welcome you to the high-end data center supercomputing world. Japanese retailer G-Dep has opened preorders on the Nvidia H100 80GB workstation station GPU (thanks to Overclockers) for the entirely reasonable price of 4,745,950 yen. That’s roughly $36,000.
Nvidia announced the H100 as the new flagship GPU for AI and data center-focused work. It contains 80 billion transistors, which is 26 billion more than the current A100 GPU. It doubles and triples the performance of the A100 depending on the task.
Just in case you can actually afford to add this thing to your cart and ship it from Japan, I should add that it isn’t optimized for gaming. You wouldn’t want to game on it: it’s designed to handle wildly complex and power-hungry computations dealing with AI and high-performance computing applications, not Doom Eternal. However, you could probably open your own portal to Hell if you hook up enough of these together.
Nvidia’s Hopper architecture has a new instruction set called DPX. It’s designed to boost performance in fields as varied as disease diagnosis, quantum simulation, graph analytics, and routing optimizations.
Speaking of juice, high-power, high-end GPUs seem like they might be the norm in the future for both gamers and data center operators, with the RTX 40-series cards rumored to carry a TGP as high as 900W.
The H100 is expected to start shipping later this year. G-Dep offers monthly installment plans to help with the upfront costs. For context, Nvidia’s current-gen A100GPU, the A100 80GB, is selling for 1,795,750 yen ($12,300) if you’re looking for a bargain.