Nvidia announces $2,999 Titan V graphics card

Nvidia has announced the launch of the Volta-based Titan V, described as 'the most powerful PC GPU ever created', which can be yours for a mere $2,999.

Unveiled by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang late on Thursday, the Titan V isn't a gaming card, despite not living in the company's Tesla accelerator or Quadro workstation families: As demonstrated by the choice of launch venue, the Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems, it's designed to bring top performance to those using graphics processors for compute-heavy work in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

'What Nvidia is all about is building tools that advance computing so we can do things that would otherwise be impossible,' Huang told attendees at the event, twenty of whom - selected at random - were given a Titan V to take home. 'Our ultimate purpose is to build computing platforms that allow you to do groundbreaking work.'

The Titan V is based on the company's latest Volta graphics architecture and packs six graphics processing clusters with 80 streaming multiprocessors for a total of 5,120 CUDA cores when operating in single-precision mode. The card's GPU also features 320 texture units, a 1,200MHz base and 1,455MHz boost clock, 850MHz memory clock for a 1.7Gb/s data rate across a 3,072-bit bus to its 12GB of High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) frame buffer, which is supported by a 4,608KB level 2 (L2) cache. 640 Tensor Cores provide additional deep-learning performance up to 110 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), according to Nvidia's internal testing.

Built around a 12nm process node and featuring 21.1 billion transistors, the card has a surprisingly low thermal design profile (TDP) for its capabilities at 250W with a recommended 600W system power supply. As you might expect from a top-end high-performance product aimed at researchers in a booming market, the Titan V is not cheap. The company is limiting purchases to two per customer - though doubtless research institutions looking to make a big buy for cluster computing or other projects would be given a pass - at $2,999 (around £2,227 excluding taxes) each.

More information is available on Nvidia's official website.