GPU Specifications

In Catching Up with Leela, I glossed over a technical point:-

If you're not familiar with GPUs like 'K80 / P100 / V100 / etc.', it's enough to know that they are three evolutions of graphic processors, the number crunchers that all [neural networks] rely on for their numeric intensive computations.

That might have been 'enough to know' for that post, but I wanted to know more. I eventually found Wikipedia's Nvidia Tesla:-

Nvidia Tesla is Nvidia's brand name for their products targeting stream processing or general-purpose GPU. Products use GPUs from the G80 series onward.

The evolution of GPUs starting around 2007 is laid out in a matrix of technical specs titled 'Specifications and configurations', and includes the three models mentioned in the 'Catching Up' post. To learn more about those specs I located a video.

Graphics Card Specs: The Basics (8:09) • 'Published on Aug 16, 2016'

The video's description explains,

Reviews and benchmarks are the most important thing to look at when buying a new graphics card. But if you ARE curious as to what these specs mean, here's a video!

The emphasis in the video is on gaming, but the connection with AI is clear enough. I'll look at that in my next post.