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crapple8430last Thursday at 2:17 AM2 repliesview on HN

While this is undoubtably still an excellent deal, the comparison to the new price of H100 is a bit misleading, since today you can buy a new, legit RTX 6000 Pro for about $7-8k, and get similar performance the first two of the models tested at least. As a bonus those can fit in a regular workstation or server, and you can buy multiple. This thing is not worth $80k in the same way that any old enterprise equipment is not worth nearly as much as its price when it was new.


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dnhknglast Thursday at 7:22 AM

Fair points, but the deal is still great because of the nuances of the RAM/VRAM.

The Blackwells are superior on paper, but there's some "Nvidia Math" involved: When they report performance in press announcements, they don't usually mention the precision. Yes, the Blackwells are more than double the speed of the Hopper H100's, but thats comparing FP8 to FP4 (the H100's can't do native FP4). Yes, thats great for certain workloads, but not the majority.

What's more interesting is the VRAM speed. The 6000 Pro has 96 GB of GPU memory and 1.8 TB/s bandwidth, the H100 haas the same amount, but with HBM3 at 4.9 TB/s. That 2.5X increase is very influential in the overall performance of the system.

Lastly, if it works, the NVLink-C2C does 900 GB/s of bandwidth between the cards, so about 5x what a pair of 6000 Pros could do over PCIE5. Big LLMs need well over the 96 GB on a single card, so this becomes the bottleneck.

e.g. Here are benchmarks on the RTX 6000 pro using the GPT-OSS-120B model, where it generates 145 tokens/sec, and I get 195 tokens/sec on the GH200. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mm7azs/openai_...

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segmondylast Thursday at 3:46 AM

you do realize he has 2 H100s, you would need to buy 2 RTX 6000 Pro for $15-$16k plus the hardware. The ram that came with that hardware is worth more than $7000 now.

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