Nvidia’s H100 GPU is one of the most popular products the tech giant has launched in recent years, albeit with some notable pricing issues and lengthy order delays.
Fortunately, there are more cost-effective alternatives that customers may not be aware of, namely the L40S series.
This powerful sibling to the H100’s GPU offers twice the memory and is a cheaper option for those who don’t have the financial resources to invest in the more expensive range.
“Fascinating” H100 alternative
Like its H100 and A100 counterparts, the L40S GPU is purpose-built to power the next generation of data center workloads in the AI era, capable of handling the intense pressures of generative AI and LLM inference and heavy 3D graphics workloads.
Serve it house managed to get his hands on an L40S and sang its praises about it, calling it a ‘fascinating’ and cheaper alternative to the H100.
“The L40S is something completely different. Nvidia took the base L40, a data center visualization GPU that uses Nvidia’s latest Ada Lovelace architecture, and changed the tunings so that it was more tailored to AI than visualization,” the release said.
The L40S still has the typical features of its predecessor, the L40, such as ray tracing cores, DisplayPort outputs and NVENC/NVDEC with AV1 support.
In this case, however, more power is allocated to the AI portions of the GPU, making it a powerful device for training models on a budget.
The L40S has much less memory capacity than the A100, which is a notable drawback to this series. However, what it lacks in size it makes up for in performance.
The GPU supports both the Nvidia Transformer Engine and FP8, which means it can significantly reduce data size and requires less memory bandwidth.
Nvidia stats show that the GPU offers tensor performance of up to 1,466 teraflops, alongside impressive RT core performance of 212 teraflops.
Nvidia L40S: a cost-effective alternative
Cost is obviously a major selling point for the L40S. At current rates, the H100 is about 2.6x the price of the GPU, making it a much cheaper option.
Availability is also another notable advantage. H100 GPUs have proven extremely popular since their launch, making them difficult to obtain.
Being a more obscure and lesser known GPU, the L40S is easier to access without a long wait.