Benchmarking the NVIDIA V100 GPU and tensor cores

Abstract

The V100 GPU is the newest server-grade GPU produced by NVIDIA and introduces a number of new hardware and API features. This paper details the results of benchmarking the V100 GPU and demonstrates that it is a significant generational improvement, increasing memory bandwidth, cache bandwidth, and reducing latency. A major new addition is the Tensor core units, which have been marketed as deep learning acceleration features that enable the computation of a 4 × 4 × 4 half precision matrix-multiply-accumulate operation in a single clock cycle. This paper confirms that the Tensor cores offer considerable performance gains for half precision general matrix multiplication; however, programming them requires fine control of the memory hierarchy that is typically unnecessary for other applications.