A100 PCIe 80GB vs H100 PCIe 80GB for LLM inference

A100 PCIe 80GB vs H100 PCIe 80GB: verdict

A100 PCIe 80GB or H100 PCIe 80GB — which one should you actually deploy on? It depends on what's constraining your workload. Since both cards carry 80GB of VRAM, VRAM-bound workloads will see no difference in capacity — the real differentiator for you becomes bandwidth, compute throughput, and price. If you're throughput-bound instead, where decode speed and memory bandwidth dominate how many tokens per second you can push, H100 PCIe 80GB pulls ahead at 1935 GB/s of memory bandwidth on the A100 PCIe 80GB versus 2000 GB/s on the H100 PCIe 80GB — the number that usually matters more than peak TFLOPS for single-stream decode latency. On cost, A100 PCIe 80GB is the cheaper rental right now. Compute throughput matters too, especially for prefill-heavy workloads: the spec table above lists bf16 and fp8 TFLOPS for both cards side by side, along with NVLink support (which determines whether you can tensor-parallel across multiple units) and power draw. Rather than picking on vibes, check the models table above to see which of today's popular open-weight models actually fit — in the dtype and context length you plan to run — on each of these two cards before you commit to renting or buying either one.