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It doesn't fit in VRAM.


I’ve been a bit surprised that Nvidia hasn’t gone to extreme lengths to fit 1tb of memory on a card just for this reason.


The issue, as pointed above, is primarily bandwidth (at inference), not addressable memory. Put simply, the best bandwidth stack we currently have is on-package HBM -> NVLink, -> Mellanox InfiniBand, and for inference speed you really can't leave the NVLink bandwidth (read, 8x DGX pod) for >100b parameters. And stacking HBM dies is much harder (read, expensive) than GDDR dies which is harder than DDR etc.

Cost aside, HMB dies themselves aren't getting significantly denser anytime soon, and there just simply isn't enough package space with current manufacturing methods to pack a significantly increased number of dies on the gpu.

So I suspect the major hardware jumps will continue to be with NVLink/NVSwitch. Nvlink 4 + NVSwitch 3 actually already allows for up 256x GPUs https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-grace-cpu/nvidia-grace-ho... ; increased numbers of links will let ever increasing numbers of GPUs pool with sufficient bandwidth for inference on larger models.

As already mentioned, see this HN post about the GH200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36133226, which has some further discussion about the cutting edge of bandwidth for Nvidia DGX and Google TPU pods.


Thanks for this info!


https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-dgx-gh20...

I think they _are_ going pretty extreme now.


Offtopic, but as a VR gamer that article just made me very sad. I was really hoping to see NVidia produce some decent cards in the near future, but looks like their main revenue is really going to be gargantuan number-crunchers. They'll likely only keep increasing the VRAM of gaming cards by arbitrarily-small numbers once every few years :-(


Gaming seems a lot less important than AI, in particular the graphical fidelity. Even games with crappy graphics can be fun. Crappy AI, not so much.


Yes, the future of VR gaming looks closer to the Sony Playstation or even the Apple Vision than NVIDIA's products.




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