What is the difference between cuda vs tensor cores?

user_5041045 0
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I am completely new to terms related to HPC computing, but I just saw that EC2 released its new type of instance on AWS that's powered by the new Nvidia Tesla V100, which has both kinds of "cores": Cuda Cores (5,120) and Tensor Cores (640). What is the difference between both?

nvidia cuda gpu
4 Answers

CUDA cores:

Does a single value multiplication per one GPU clock 

1 x 1 per GPU clock

TENSOR cores:

Does a matrix multiplication per one GPU clock

[1 1 1       [1 1 1
 1 1 1   x    1 1 1    per GPU clock
 1 1 1]       1 1 1]

To be more precise TENSOR core does the computation of many CUDA cores in the same time.

user_132842230

Tensor cores use a lot less computation power at the expense of precision than Cuda Cores, but that loss of precision doesn't have that much effect on the final output.

This is why for Machine Learning models, Tensor Cores are more effective at cost reduction without changing the output that much.

Google itself uses the Tensor Processing Units for google translate.

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