Nvidia's H100 arrives in German retail stores

Nvidia is apparently loosening the supply chain for accelerator cards from the Hopper generation, while the focus is shifting to the successor generation Blackwell. While the H100 model was once hardly available, common retail dealers such as Mindfactory and Jacob Elektronik now list different variants.

The H100 NVL is available as a PCI Express plug-in card. The NVL version uses the GH100 GPU with 132 active streaming multiprocessors, i.e. 16,896 shader cores. In addition, there are six memory stacks of the High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM3) type with a usable capacity of 94 GB. With a typical boost clock frequency of 1837 MHz, the shader cores manage a good 31 trillion calculations per second with 64-bit floating point values (31 FP64 teraflops), 62 FP32 teraflops and 124 FP16 teraflops.

The integrated tensor cores for matrix calculations achieve up to 3341 trillion operations per second with 8-bit integers (3341 INT8 teraflops) when the sparsity function is active, i.e. zero values are omitted.

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Gamers hands off

Caution: Even if the H100 GPUs manage many teraflops, they are not suitable as gaming graphics cards. Only four shader multiprocessors, organized in two so-called Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs), can render 3D graphics with vertex, geometry and pixel shaders. That's 512 shader cores, which is even fewer than in the integrated GPUs of current AMD Ryzen processors. Also worth noting: The card itself has no fan and needs strong case ventilation to dissipate the waste heat.

All other shader cores perform compute tasks, such as for classic model simulations. However, Nvidia's server GPUs are mainly in demand for their AI capabilities and the associated software support.

The original H100 is also available as a PCIe card (starting from 38675 €), but for 10,000 euros more than the NVL version with lower computing power and less memory. It uses 114 instead of 132 shader multiprocessors and 80 GByte HBM2e instead of 94 GByte faster HBM3.

DGX B200 from 349,000 euros

If you want the new H200 with even more and faster HBM3e, as a commercial customer, you have to turn to specialized server dealers such as Delta Computer. They sell the H200 with 141 GB of memory for 29,741 euros excluding tax, i.e. a total of just under 35,400 euros. Universities, colleges and university hospitals, among others, pay just under 25,000 euros excluding tax.

Delta Computer also already sells Nvidia's DGX-B200 system with eight B200 GPUs from the new Blackwell generation and two Intel Xeon Platinum 8570 (together 112 CPU cores, Emerald Rapids). Universities & Co. pay just under 349,000 euros excluding taxes for the system; the standard version for everyone else costs just under 565,000 euros excluding taxes.

(mma)