A40 vs H100

The FP16 dense performance of 149.7 TFLOPS on the A40 versus 989 TFLOPS on the H100 indicates that the H100 completes matrix operations in FP16 dense format substantially faster. Similar ratios apply to FP16 with sparsity where the A40 reaches 299.4 TFLOPS and the H100 reaches 1979 TFLOPS. The FP32 figure of 37.4 TFLOPS on the A40 against 67 TFLOPS on the H100 further widens the gap for precision sensitive workloads. Memory bandwidth of 696 GB/s on the A40 compared to 3350 GB/s on the H100 allows larger batch sizes during training and inference on the H100 because data movement occurs at a higher rate. The INT8 dense rating of 299.3 TOPS on the A40 versus 1979 TOPS on the H100 shows the same pattern across integer operations.

The A40 suits environments constrained by the 300W TDP limit because its power draw remains half that of the 700W TDP on the H100. Deployments restricted to PCIe form factors align with the A40 specifications while the H100 offers additional SXM5 and NVL options. The 48 GB GDDR6 capacity on the A40 meets requirements for moderate scale models without excess overhead.

The H100 addresses workloads that require the 989 TFLOPS FP16 dense rating or the 3350 GB/s memory bandwidth because these numbers exceed the A40 equivalents by wide margins. The higher FP32 rating of 67 TFLOPS also favors the H100 for scientific tasks.