Ampere
NVIDIA A30
wins
1
The NVIDIA A30 is a data center Ampere GPU with 24GB HBM2 and NVLink support.
Ada Lovelace
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
wins
4
The RTX 6000 Ada is NVIDIA's professional workstation GPU with 48GB GDDR6 and 364 TFLOPS FP16.
Performance comparison
Visual bars — winner highlighted
NVIDIA A30
Metric
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
FP16 TFLOPS
Bandwidth
VRAM
TDP (lower=better)
TFLOPS/watt
GB/s per watt
Full specification table
| Spec | NVIDIA A30 | NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| VRAM | 24 GB HBM2 | 48 GB GDDR6 |
| VRAM type | HBM2 | GDDR6 |
| Memory bandwidth | 933 GB/s | 960 GB/s |
| FP16 TFLOPS | 165 TFLOPS | 364 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 165 W | 300 W |
| TFLOPS/watt | 1.00 T/W | 1.21 T/W |
| GB/s per watt | 5.65 GB/s/W | 3.20 GB/s/W |
| NVLink | Yes | No |
| Release year | 2021 | 2022 |
Live cloud pricing
On-demand pricing across providers — updated in real time
NVIDIA A30
No live pricing data available.
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
Power efficiency analysis
TFLOPS/watt and GB/s/watt — critical for data center TCO
NVIDIA A30
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
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.
Performance-per-dollar
TFLOPS/$ and GB/s/$ at current best cloud prices
NVIDIA A30
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
TFLOPS/$ = FP16 TFLOPS ÷ best on-demand $/hr. Higher is better — more compute per dollar. GB/s/$ = memory bandwidth ÷ best on-demand $/hr. For memory-bound inference workloads (most LLM serving), GB/s/$ is often a better predictor of cost-efficiency than TFLOPS/$. Prices are live from the Compute Comparison API and update in real time.
Workload Cost Comparison
Total job cost = best on-demand $/hr × GPU count × hours
| Workload | Scale | NVIDIA A30 | NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7B LLM fine-tune | 8× GPU, 24 h | — | $149 |
| 70B LLM fine-tune | 64× GPU, 72 h | — | $3.6k |
| Inference server | 1× GPU, 730 h | — | $567 |
| Image gen batch | 4× GPU, 8 h | — | $25 |
Based on current best on-demand prices. Spot pricing typically 40–70% lower. Actual cost depends on provider, region, and availability.
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 6000 Ada for:
- Professional inference
- Fine-tuning
- Workstation AI
Weaknesses / Limitations
- GDDR6 bandwidth lower than HBM-based data center GPUs
- No NVLink on Ada generation
- Workstation positioning means higher list price than L40S for similar specs
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