Chip comparison
NVIDIA L40S 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 | NVIDIA L40S | SambaNova SN40L |
|---|---|---|
| Process node | TSMC 4N | TSMC N5 |
| Transistors (B) | 76.3 | — |
| TDP | 350 W | 700 W |
| Memory | 48 GB GDDR6 | 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5) |
| Memory bandwidth | 864 GB/s | — |
| FP16 (dense) | 362 TFLOPS | 638 TFLOPS |
| BF16 (dense) | 362 TFLOPS | — |
| FP8 (dense) | 733 TFLOPS | 1,250 TFLOPS |
| INT8 (dense) | 733 TOPS | — |
| Form factor | PCIe | PCIe (SN40L DataScale system) |
| Announced | 2023-08-08 | 2023-09-19 |
| Released | — | 2024-01-01 |
Robots running NVIDIA L40S
No robots publicly running it yet.
Robots running SambaNova SN40L
No robots publicly running it yet.
Data centers with NVIDIA L40S
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Data centers with SambaNova SN40L
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Common questions
NVIDIA L40S vs SambaNova SN40L: which is faster for training?
SambaNova SN40L has 1.71x the dense FP8 throughput of the other (NVIDIA L40S: 733 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.
NVIDIA L40S vs SambaNova SN40L: which has more memory?
SambaNova SN40L carries more HBM (NVIDIA L40S: 48 GB GDDR6; 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.
NVIDIA L40S vs SambaNova SN40L: which is more power-efficient?
Dense FP8 TFLOPS per watt: NVIDIA L40S 2.09 (733 ÷ 350 W); SambaNova SN40L 1.79 (1,250 ÷ 700 W). NVIDIA L40S wins at the die level; system-level efficiency also depends on cooling and interconnect.
See also: every chip comparison · NVIDIA L40S full page · SambaNova SN40L full page.