Ampere
NVIDIA A30
wins
3
The NVIDIA A30 is a data center Ampere GPU with 24GB HBM2 and NVLink support.
Ampere
NVIDIA RTX 3090
wins
2
The RTX 3090 remains a popular budget option for AI workloads with 24GB GDDR6X.
Performance comparison
Visual bars — winner highlighted
NVIDIA A30
Metric
NVIDIA RTX 3090
FP16 TFLOPS
Bandwidth
VRAM
TDP (lower=better)
TFLOPS/watt
GB/s per watt
Full specification table
| Spec | NVIDIA A30 | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere |
| VRAM | 24 GB HBM2 | 24 GB GDDR6X |
| VRAM type | HBM2 | GDDR6X |
| Memory bandwidth | 933 GB/s | 936 GB/s |
| FP16 TFLOPS | 165 TFLOPS | 71 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 165 W | 350 W |
| TFLOPS/watt | 1.00 T/W | 0.20 T/W |
| GB/s per watt | 5.65 GB/s/W | 2.67 GB/s/W |
| NVLink | Yes | 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
NVIDIA A30
NVIDIA RTX 3090
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 NVIDIA A30 for:
- Inference
- HPC
- Multi-instance GPU
Weaknesses / Limitations
- 24 GB VRAM limits model size
- Older Ampere architecture — lower TFLOPS than newer GPUs
- Being superseded by L4 and A10 on most inference platforms
Choose NVIDIA RTX 3090 for:
- Budget fine-tuning
- Small model inference
- Hobbyist AI
Weaknesses / Limitations
- Older Ampere architecture — significantly lower TFLOPS than Ada equivalents
- 350W TDP — high power draw for a 24 GB consumer card
- No ECC memory — not suitable for production reliability requirements
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