Hopper (microarchitecture)

Hopper is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia.

It improves upon its predecessors, the Turing and Ampere microarchitectures, featuring a new streaming multiprocessor, a faster memory subsystem, and a transformer acceleration engine.

[7] Hopper features improved single-precision floating-point format (FP32) throughput with twice as many FP32 operations per cycle per SM than its predecessor.

This feature does not increase the amount of memory available to the application, because the data (and thus its compressibility) may be changed at any time.

[10] Some CUDA applications may experience interference when performing fence or flush operations due to memory ordering.

[11] The Hopper architecture math application programming interface (API) exposes functions in the SM such as __viaddmin_s16x2_relu, which performs the per-halfword

[16] In November 2019, a well-known Twitter account posted a tweet revealing that the next architecture after Ampere would be called Hopper, named after computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral Grace Hopper, one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I.

The account stated that Hopper would be based on a multi-chip module design, which would result in a yield gain with lower wastage.

[19][20] In late 2023, the US government announced new restrictions on the export of AI chips to China, including the A800 and H800 models.

Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation said that year that at a dinner with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, he and Elon Musk of Tesla, Inc. and xAI "were begging" for H100s, "I guess is the best way to describe it.

[22] In January 2024, Raymond James Financial analysts estimated that Nvidia was selling the H100 GPU in the price range of $25,000 to $30,000 each, while on eBay, individual H100s cost over $40,000.

[23] As of February 2024, Nvidia was reportedly shipping H100 GPUs to data centers in armored cars.