NVIDIA A40 48GB vs NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada 48GB

The RTX 6000 Ada is the newer part: Ada Lovelace, launched in 2023, against the A40's Ampere from 2021. Newer architectures typically add lower-precision formats and better throughput per watt, so check the precision rows your workload actually uses.

Dense throughput for the A40 against the RTX 6000 Ada: FP32 37 vs 91 TFLOPS. Sparse figures, where the vendor publishes them, appear under each dense number in the performance table.

Memory is 48 GB against 48 GB, fed at 696 GB/s versus 960 GB/s. More memory per GPU means larger models fit before you have to shard across cards, which often matters more than raw TFLOPS for inference.

Power budgets are 300 W for the A40 and 300 W for the RTX 6000 Ada. At FP32 that works out to 0.12 against 0.30 TFLOPS per watt.

For LLM training and inference, weight the FP8 and FP16 rows and memory capacity most heavily. For scientific and HPC workloads, the FP64 row is the one to read.