Chip comparison
Google TPU v5e vs NVIDIA L40S
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 | Google TPU v5e | NVIDIA L40S |
|---|---|---|
| Process node | — | TSMC 4N |
| Transistors (B) | — | 76.3 |
| TDP | 170 W | 350 W |
| Memory | 16 GB HBM2 | 48 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bandwidth | 819 GB/s | 864 GB/s |
| FP16 (dense) | — | 362 TFLOPS |
| BF16 (dense) | 197 TFLOPS | 362 TFLOPS |
| FP8 (dense) | — | 733 TFLOPS |
| INT8 (dense) | 393 TOPS | 733 TOPS |
| Form factor | OAM (v5e pod, up to 256 chips) | PCIe |
| Announced | 2023-08-29 | 2023-08-08 |
| Released | 2023-11-01 | — |
Robots running Google TPU v5e
No robots publicly running it yet.
Robots running NVIDIA L40S
No robots publicly running it yet.
Data centers with Google TPU v5e
Data centers with NVIDIA L40S
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Common questions
Google TPU v5e vs NVIDIA L40S: which is faster for training?
NVIDIA L40S has 3.72x the dense FP16/BF16 throughput of the other (Google TPU v5e: 197 TFLOPS; NVIDIA L40S: 733 TFLOPS). Real-world training speed also depends on memory bandwidth, interconnect, and software stack: see the spec diff for those inputs.
Google TPU v5e vs NVIDIA L40S: which has more memory?
NVIDIA L40S carries more HBM (Google TPU v5e: 16 GB HBM2; NVIDIA L40S: 48 GB GDDR6). Memory capacity sets the largest model that fits on one chip without partitioning; memory bandwidth sets inference throughput.
Google TPU v5e vs NVIDIA L40S: which is more power-efficient?
Dense FP16/BF16 TFLOPS per watt: Google TPU v5e 1.16 (197 ÷ 170 W); NVIDIA L40S 2.09 (733 ÷ 350 W). NVIDIA L40S wins at the die level; system-level efficiency also depends on cooling and interconnect.
Google TPU v5e vs NVIDIA L40S: which is more widely used?
Google TPU v5e: 0 robots and 1 data center publicly running it. NVIDIA L40S: 0 robots and 0 data centers. Empty here means no operator has said publicly, not zero adoption in the market.
See also: every chip comparison · Google TPU v5e full page · NVIDIA L40S full page.