NVIDIA A100 80GB

The NVIDIA A100 80GB, based on the Ampere architecture, was the dominant AI training GPU from 2020 to 2023 before being succeeded by the H100. It remains one of the most cost-effective options for mid-scale training and fine-tuning workloads.

With 312 FP16 TFLOPS and 80GB of HBM2e memory providing 2.0 TB/s bandwidth, the A100 80GB can handle training of models up to approximately 30 billion parameters on a single GPU. For larger models, multi-GPU configurations using NVLink 3.0 (600 GB/s bidirectional) are widely supported.

The A100 introduced third-generation Tensor Cores and structural sparsity support, which can effectively double throughput for inference workloads. It also pioneered Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) technology, allowing a single A100 to be partitioned into up to seven independent GPU instances — making it efficient for serving multiple smaller models simultaneously.

In today's market, the A100 offers an attractive price/performance ratio. While it delivers roughly one-third the raw FP16 performance of the H100, it typically costs less than half the price per hour, making it the preferred choice for cost-conscious training and fine-tuning operations.

Common Use Cases

Manufacturer

NVIDIA

Architecture

Ampere

Accelerator Type

GPU

Primary Use

training

Memory (VRAM)

80 GB

FP16 Performance

312 TFLOPS

Thermal Design Power

400W