A16 vs P100

The FP16 to FP32 ratio on the A16 reaches 17.9 TFLOPS dense FP16 divided by 4.5 TFLOPS FP32 while the same ratio on the P100 reaches 18.7 TFLOPS dense FP16 divided by 9.3 TFLOPS FP32. This difference indicates that the P100 maintains a higher share of its peak throughput when moving from reduced precision to full precision workloads. Memory bandwidth of 200 GB/s on the A16 versus 732 GB/s on the P100 directly limits the largest batch sizes that fit within a given latency target during inference or training steps that move large activation tensors. When comparing dense FP16 figures the P100 holds a modest 18.7 TFLOPS dense FP16 advantage over the 17.9 TFLOPS dense FP16 of the A16 and the same pattern holds when sparsity is applied because the P100 figure remains unavailable for direct comparison.

The A16 becomes the better choice for inference pipelines that rely on INT8 dense performance of 35.9 TOPS or INT8 performance with sparsity of 71.8 TOPS. Its PCIe 4.0 interface also suits servers that require the newer interconnect standard without NVLink support.

The P100 becomes the better choice for workloads that need the 732 GB/s memory bandwidth to sustain larger batch sizes during FP32 computation at 9.3 TFLOPS. Its NVLink interconnect further benefits multi GPU scaling in scientific computing clusters.