NVIDIA Reaffirms Support for FP64, Next-Gen GPU to Bring HPC Improvements

NVIDIA’s recent generations of GPUs, such as “Hopper” and “Blackwell,” have been known for stalling their high-performance computing (HPC) oriented FP64 double-precision performance. However, the company is not inherently abandoning the HPC space and has confirmed for HPCWire that 64-bit floating point data is not going away. According to Dion Harris, the senior director of HPC and AI hyperscale infrastructure solutions at NVIDIA, the company is “definitely looking to bring some additional [FP64] capabilities in our future gen architectures. We are very serious about making sure that we can deliver the required performance to power those simulation workloads.”

The acceleration of 64-bit floating-point data paths is crucial for the HPC community, particularly in the life sciences. When a workload demands sustained high-precision support, NVIDIA’s recent generations have not met expectations. For comparison, NVIDIA’s current most powerful B300 “Blackwell Ultra” accelerator achieves only 1.2 TeraFLOPS of FP64 performance. In contrast, the older H200 “Hopper” reaches an impressive 34 TeraFLOPS of FP64 compute at its peak. For FP8 low-precision, the B300 delivers 9 PetaFLOPS, while the H200 provides 3.958 PetaFLOPS.

This clearly indicates that NVIDIA has been focusing on optimizing for lower precision, beneficial for AI training and inference. For a while, the HPC community has been overlooked, forcing them to seek other brands for the desired FP64 performance. However, NVIDIA…