Chip comparison
AWS Inferentia 2 vs SambaNova SN40L
Side-by-side specs
Straight from each vendor's datasheet. Winner in bold: higher throughput, memory, or transistor count; lower power draw or price. Sparse (2:4) throughput roughly doubles the FP8/INT8 numbers shown.
| Field | AWS Inferentia 2 | SambaNova SN40L |
|---|---|---|
| Process node | TSMC N7 | TSMC N5 |
| TDP | 250 W | 700 W |
| Memory | 32 GB HBM3 | 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5) |
| Memory bandwidth | 820 GB/s | — |
| FP16 (dense) | — | 638 TFLOPS |
| BF16 (dense) | 190 TFLOPS | — |
| FP8 (dense) | 380 TFLOPS | 1,250 TFLOPS |
| Form factor | Inf2 EC2 instance | PCIe (SN40L DataScale system) |
| Announced | 2022-12-01 | 2023-09-19 |
| Released | 2023-04-01 | 2024-01-01 |
Robots running AWS Inferentia 2
No robots publicly running it yet.
Robots running SambaNova SN40L
No robots publicly running it yet.
Data centers with AWS Inferentia 2
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Data centers with SambaNova SN40L
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Common questions
AWS Inferentia 2 vs SambaNova SN40L: which is faster for training?
SambaNova SN40L has 3.29x the dense FP8 throughput of the other (AWS Inferentia 2: 380 TFLOPS; SambaNova SN40L: 1,250 TFLOPS). Real-world training speed also depends on memory bandwidth, interconnect, and software stack: see the spec diff for those inputs.
AWS Inferentia 2 vs SambaNova SN40L: which has more memory?
SambaNova SN40L carries more HBM (AWS Inferentia 2: 32 GB HBM3; SambaNova SN40L: 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5)). Memory capacity sets the largest model that fits on one chip without partitioning; memory bandwidth sets inference throughput.
AWS Inferentia 2 vs SambaNova SN40L: which is more power-efficient?
Dense FP8 TFLOPS per watt: AWS Inferentia 2 1.52 (380 ÷ 250 W); SambaNova SN40L 1.79 (1,250 ÷ 700 W). SambaNova SN40L wins at the die level; system-level efficiency also depends on cooling and interconnect.
See also: every chip comparison · AWS Inferentia 2 full page · SambaNova SN40L full page.