CDNA 2
AMD Instinct MI250X
wins
4
The AMD Instinct MI250X is AMD's CDNA 2 data center GPU.
Ampere
NVIDIA A40
wins
1
The NVIDIA A40 offers 48GB GDDR6 at a lower price point than the A100.
Performance comparison
Visual bars — winner highlighted
AMD Instinct MI250X
Metric
NVIDIA A40
FP16 TFLOPS
Bandwidth
VRAM
TDP (lower=better)
TFLOPS/watt
GB/s per watt
Full specification table
| Spec | AMD Instinct MI250X | NVIDIA A40 |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | CDNA 2 | Ampere |
| VRAM | 128 GB HBM2e | 48 GB GDDR6 |
| VRAM type | HBM2e | GDDR6 |
| Memory bandwidth | 3,277 GB/s | 696 GB/s |
| FP16 TFLOPS | 383 TFLOPS | 150 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 560 W | 300 W |
| TFLOPS/watt | 0.68 T/W | 0.50 T/W |
| GB/s per watt | 5.85 GB/s/W | 2.32 GB/s/W |
| NVLink | No | No |
| Release year | 2021 | 2020 |
Live cloud pricing
On-demand pricing across providers — updated in real time
Power efficiency analysis
TFLOPS/watt and GB/s/watt — critical for data center TCO
AMD Instinct MI250X
NVIDIA A40
TFLOPS/watt measures compute efficiency — how much AI throughput you get per watt of power consumed. For data centers with PUE of 1.2–1.5, a 10% improvement in TFLOPS/watt translates directly to lower electricity costs and cooling requirements. GB/s/watt measures memory bandwidth efficiency, which is the binding constraint for memory-bound LLM inference workloads.
When to choose each GPU
Choose AMD Instinct MI250X for:
- HPC workloads
- Large model inference
- AMD ROCm deployments
Weaknesses / Limitations
- Older CDNA 2 architecture — lower FP16 TFLOPS than MI300X or H100
- ROCm software ecosystem less mature than CUDA
- 560W TDP — high power draw for its performance tier
Choose NVIDIA A40 for:
- Large model inference
- Professional rendering
- Multi-tenant AI
Weaknesses / Limitations
- Older Ampere architecture — lower FP16 TFLOPS than L40S at same VRAM
- GDDR6 bandwidth (696 GB/s) lower than HBM-based GPUs
- No NVLink on A40
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