A40

The NVIDIA A40 is an Ampere data-center GPU that combines 48GB of GDDR6 with a 300W thermal envelope and broad professional graphics support. Its 74.8 TFLOPS of FP16/BF16 compute makes it useful for mixed visualization and AI work, while its 48GB capacity is the feature that separates it from many lower-cost inference cards.

Its 696 GB/s GDDR6 bandwidth is far below A100-class HBM throughput, so it is better at workloads that need capacity or graphics features than at bandwidth-intensive autoregressive generation. The 48GB allocation gives useful room for medium-sized models, quantized larger models, and rendering assets, but there is no NVLink to combine memory across cards.

The A40 fits virtual workstations, rendering plus inference, and mid-size model serving where 48GB is more important than peak tokens per second. It is an older Ampere option with no FP8 support and is not a direct substitute for an HBM accelerator in large-model training.