Gaudi 3 vs A100 80GB
Gaudi 3 has 1.6× the memory; Gaudi 3 has 1.9× the bandwidth; A100 80GB rents for 2.6× less.
The Intel Gaudi 3 (Gaudi, 2024) and the NVIDIA A100 80GB (Ampere, 2020) come from different vendors and different design goals, but they get cross-shopped for a reason. On capacity, the Gaudi 3 carries 1.6x the memory (128 vs 80 GB), which sets what each can hold at all. On memory bandwidth, the number that governs LLM serving speed, the Gaudi 3 leads at 3.7 vs 2 TB/s. Raw compute favors the Gaudi 3 by 2.9x, which matters for training, prefill-heavy traffic, and diffusion work more than for chat-style decoding. The Gaudi 3 also speaks native FP8 while the A100 80GB tops out at BF16/INT8, a generational gap explained in CUDA cores vs Tensor Cores.
Price is where it settles: the A100 80GB rents from $0.87/hr against $2.30/hr for the Gaudi 3, a 2.6x gap that the performance numbers above only partly close. Per gigabyte of VRAM, the A100 80GB is the cheaper rental, worth knowing if your model is capacity-bound rather than speed-bound. For why Ampere remains the value benchmark this comparison is priced against, see The A100 in 2026. Everything below is the underlying data.
Intel · Gaudi · 2024
Intel Gaudi 3
Intel's price-performance play, with Ethernet-native scale-out instead of proprietary interconnect.
From $2.30/hr at FluidStack
NVIDIA · Ampere · 2020
NVIDIA A100 80GB
The GPU that started the LLM era, now a value pick for fine-tuning and mid-size inference.
From $0.87/hr at Vast.ai
Head to head
■ Gaudi 3 ■ A100 80GB, bars share one scale across the whole catalog.
| Gaudi 3 | A100 80GB | |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 128 GB HBM2e | 80 GB HBM2e |
| Bandwidth | 3.7 TB/s | 2 TB/s |
| FP16 dense | 918 TF | 312 TF |
| FP8 dense | 1,835 TF | - |
| TDP | 900 W | 400 W |
| Interconnect | 24×200GbE RoCE on-chip | NVLink 3 · 600 GB/s |
| Cheapest rental | $2.30/hr | $0.87/hr |
| $/hr per GB VRAM | $1.8¢ | $1.1¢ |
What one can run that the other can't
Only on Gaudi 3
- Mixtral 8x22B (4-bit)
- gpt-oss-120b (4-bit)
Only on A100 80GB
Nothing, Gaudi 3 runs everything A100 80GB does.
Rule of thumb: for LLM serving, prefer the GPU with more memory bandwidth per dollar; for training and prefill-heavy work, prefer FLOPS per dollar; and if the model doesn't fit in VRAM, none of the other numbers matter. Sanity-check with the VRAM calculator.