Automotive A100 SXM2 for FSD? (NVIDIA DRIVE A100)

[Underscore]

I recently found a new A100 listing on eBay. The fact that it really does appear to be an SXM2 model is what really caught my eye (plus the very cheap price for an A100).

Has anyone heard of this? The PCIe DRIVE A100's documented on TechPowerUp so I wonder if anybody's tried this before on any non-FSD project.

 

[bayleyw]

These are nothing close to 'very cheap', they are engineering samples that only have 4 stacks of HBM (32GB, reduced bandwidth). I've seen them work fine on third-party PCI-e adapters, but its unclear if they have NVLINK and ostensibly if you're buying an SXM2 A100 instead of an SXM4 based one its because you have some SXM2 based trays that you would like to upgrade.

If they have NVLINK I'd pay about $2K for them, if they don't maybe $1K - after the adapter and cooler you're looking at a $1500 project for a six-slot (!) thick PCI-e GPU that is basically a 4090 with 8GB of extra memory.

 

[Underscore]

PCI-e GPU that is basically a 4090 with 8GB of extra memory.

Oh definitely not worth it as it is, but I'm just curious if this will ever be an option in say three to three years, about how old the V100 is now. As you know, the V100's an extremely viable option as a GPU especially when NVLinked, and its price dropped exponentially over 6 years as would be expected.

The standard A100 plus any SXM4 boards are far from being average consumer friendly even after some years excluding private single-GPU adapters, whereas an engineering sample, especially SXM2, could be a good option on a standard AOM-SXMV or 0CTHR in the (relatively) near future. Whether it can be NVLinked is of course an important question too as you mention.

 

[bayleyw]

in three years time you'll be able to buy HGX A100s for cheap, and the Redstone boards will be much easier to deal with since there is only one implementation instead of half a dozen DGX-like flavors

 

[MilkyWeight]

These are nothing close to 'very cheap', they are engineering samples that only have 4 stacks of HBM (32GB, reduced bandwidth). I've seen them work fine on third-party PCI-e adapters, but its unclear if they have NVLINK and ostensibly if you're buying an SXM2 A100 instead of an SXM4 based one its because you have some SXM2 based trays that you would like to upgrade.

If they have NVLINK I'd pay about $2K for them, if they don't maybe $1K - after the adapter and cooler you're looking at a $1500 project for a six-slot (!) thick PCI-e GPU that is basically a 4090 with 8GB of extra memory.

I bought two of these to test out. I tried them on a server with an SXM2 GPU board/module. Didn’t even recognize it. So I got a PCIe adapter and tested. Same, isn’t even being recognized. Is there some trick to using them?

 

[bayleyw]

I've definitely seen them run on PCIe adapters. What server did you test on?