A100 80GB

The NVIDIA A100 80GB is the most widely deployed GPU for production AI workloads and remains the benchmark against which newer GPUs are measured. Built on the Ampere architecture (GA100 die, TSMC 7nm), it delivers 312 TFLOPS of FP16/BF16 throughput with 80GB of HBM2e memory at 2,039 GB/s bandwidth. Released in 2020, it has the most mature software ecosystem of any data center GPU — virtually every ML framework, inference server, and cloud provider has been optimized for A100 performance.

The 80GB HBM2e configuration fits a 40B parameter model at FP16 or an 80B model at INT8. NVLink 3.0 at 600 GB/s bidirectional enables efficient multi-GPU tensor parallelism for 70B+ models across 8-GPU DGX A100 nodes. The A100 lacks native FP8 support (introduced in H100's Hopper architecture), which limits peak throughput for inference workloads that could benefit from reduced precision. INT8 inference via TensorRT is well-supported and delivers 624 TOPS.

The A100 80GB is the right choice for teams that need proven reliability, broad software support, and predictable performance. It is the most cost-effective option for training 7B–30B models and for inference serving of models that fit in 80GB. For workloads requiring FP8 throughput or models above 70B parameters, the H100 is the better choice — but at a significant cost premium. The A100 remains the most available high-end GPU across cloud providers, making it the default choice when H100 availability is limited.