NVIDIA A100 vs L40S
NVIDIA lists the A100 80GB SXM with 80GB HBM2e of memory at 2,039 GB/s, and the L40S with 48GB GDDR6 with ECC at 864GB/s. Specs below are from NVIDIA's own spec sheets; rental prices are from each cloud's own price list. 8 of the GPU clouds tracked here price at least one of the two, and 4 price both.
Specifications
Each card's flagship server variant as NVIDIA names it, figures as NVIDIA prints them. A100: Figures from the Specifications table on NVIDIA's A100 product page, where a figure printed once across both columns is repeated in each. Figures marked * are with sparsity, as NVIDIA's footnote states. L40S: Figures from the specifications table on NVIDIA's L40S product page, which prints no unit on its FP16 and FP8 rows and separates dense and sparse figures with "I". Figures marked * are with sparsity, as NVIDIA's footnote states.
| Spec | A100 80GB SXM | L40S |
|---|---|---|
| GPU memory | 80GB HBM2e | 48GB GDDR6 with ECC |
| Memory bandwidth | 2,039 GB/s | 864GB/s |
| FP8 Tensor Core | Not stated | 733 I 1,466* |
| INT8 Tensor Core | 624 TOPS | 1248 TOPS* | 733 I 1,466* TOPS |
| FP16 Tensor Core | 312 TFLOPS | 624 TFLOPS* | 362.05 I 733* |
| BF16 Tensor Core | 312 TFLOPS | 624 TFLOPS* | 362.05 I 733* TFLOPS |
| TF32 Tensor Core | 156 TFLOPS | 312 TFLOPS* | 183 I 366* TFLOPS |
| FP32 | 19.5 TFLOPS | 91.6 TFLOPS |
| FP64 Tensor Core | 19.5 TFLOPS | Not stated |
| FP64 | 9.7 TFLOPS | Not stated |
| Max thermal design power (TDP) | 400W*** | Not stated |
| Interconnect | NVLink: 600 GB/s PCIe Gen4: 64 GB/s | PCIe Gen4 x16: 64GB/s bidirectional |
| Form factor | SXM | 4.4" (H) x 10.5" (L), dual slot |
| Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) | Up to 7 MIGs @ 10GB | No |
What renting each costs
Hourly on-demand prices from each cloud's own price list, alphabetical by cloud and not ranked: some price per GPU and others a whole multi-GPU node, and the unit is on every figure. Clouds that rent only one of the two show a dash for the other.
| Cloud | A100 | L40S |
|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave | NVIDIA A100: $21.60 for 8 GPUs 27 Sept | NVIDIA L40S: $18.00 for 8 GPUs 27 Sept |
| Crusoe Cloud | NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe: $2.00 per GPU 27 SeptNVIDIA A100 80GB SXM: $2.30 per GPU 27 Sept | NVIDIA L40S 48GB: $1.50 per GPU 27 Sept |
| Hyperstack | NVIDIA A100: $1.35 per GPU 27 SeptNVIDIA A100 NVLink: $1.40 per GPU 27 SeptNVIDIA A100 SXM: $1.60 per GPU 27 Sept | — |
| Lambda | NVIDIA A100 SXM: $1.99 per GPU 27 SeptNVIDIA A100 PCIe: $1.99 per GPU 27 SeptNVIDIA A100 SXM: $2.79 per GPU 27 Sept | — |
| Nebius AI Cloud | — | NVIDIA L40S with Intel CPU: $1.55 per GPU 27 SeptNVIDIA L40S with AMD CPU: $1.82 per GPU 27 Sept |
| Paperspace | A100: $3.09 per GPU 27 SeptA100-80G: $3.18 per GPU 27 Sept | — |
| RunPod | A100 SXM: $1.59 per GPU 27 Sept | L40S: $1.09 per GPU 27 Sept |
| Vast.ai | A100 SXM4: $0.37 per GPU 27 Sept | L40S: $0.47 per GPU 27 Sept |