Price/Performance Frontier - AI Accelerator Comparison & TCO Calculator
Compare AI accelerator price-performance across Nvidia H100, H200, Blackwell B200, B100, AMD Instinct MI300X, MI325X, Intel Gaudi 2, Gaudi 3, Google TPU v5p, AWS Trainium 2, and Groq LPU. Analyze TFLOPS per dollar, inference throughput (tokens/sec), LLM training time-to-convergence, and total cost of ownership (TCO) including electricity and cooling at cluster scale from 1 chip to 16,384 chips.
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Efficiency Frontier
Visualize the price-performance landscape. Compare raw throughput (TFLOPS) or inference speed (Tokens/Sec) against Market Price or Manufacturing Cost.
Best Value Configs (Top 5)
| Rank | Chip / Cluster | Raw Value (Perf/$1M) | Ecosystem Maturity | Strategic Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Google TPU v5p Optical (ICI) | ∞ | JAX/XLA (Internal) | Balanced |
| #2 | AWS Trainium 2 NeuronLink | ∞ | Neuron (Internal) | Balanced |
| #3 | Intel Gaudi 3 Ethernet (RoCE) | 117,440 | OneAPI (Specific) | High Engineering Overhead |
| #4 | AMD Instinct MI300X Infinity Fabric | 87,133 | ROCm (Maturing) | High Engineering Overhead |
| #5 | AMD Instinct MI325X Infinity Fabric | 65,350 | ROCm (Maturing) | High Engineering Overhead |
The "Value Trap": Why isn't the cheapest chip the winner?
While AMD and Intel often win on "Paper Value" (Raw TFLOPS per Dollar), Nvidia retains 80%+ market share due to the "Software Moat."
- Engineering Time: Saving $5k on hardware is lost if your $200k/yr engineers spend 3 months porting code from CUDA to ROCm.
- Reliability at Scale: At 10,000+ GPUs, Nvidia's mature drivers often crash less frequently than competitors, saving millions in idle cluster time.
Hyperscaler Reality: Trainium & TPU
AWS Trainium and Google TPU often appear lower on "Raw Specs" charts. This is misleading. Their value comes from Vertical Integration.
- Zero Margin Stacking: Google/AWS pay "Manufacturing Cost," not "Market Price." They effectively get a ~50-70% discount vs. buying Nvidia.
- System-Level Yield: They don't need "Hero Specs" (Peak TFLOPS). They optimize for stable, sustained throughput across 50,000 chips using custom liquid cooling and optical fabrics.
AI Accelerator Cost-Performance Analysis
Evaluating AI chip comparison metrics requires looking beyond raw TFLOPS specifications. For data center buyers, the economics of AI hardware procurement depend on cost per useful computation, training throughput per dollar, power efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO) over a 3–5 year deployment lifecycle. This frontier analysis plots accelerators on these dimensions to reveal which chips offer the best value for specific workloads.
Key Metrics: Cost per TFLOP and TCO
The H100 cost per FP16 TFLOP is roughly $16–20 at list price, while the B200 improves this to $8–12 per TFLOP thanks to doubled compute density. AMD's MI300X competes aggressively on B200 price performance with higher HBM capacity (192GB vs 192GB) at a lower estimated selling price. However, raw TFLOP cost ignores software ecosystem maturity, memory bandwidth bottlenecks, and cluster-scale networking costs—all of which affect real-world GPU TCO analysis.
Workload-Specific Evaluation
Different accelerators excel at different tasks. NVIDIA's B200 dominates large-scale training with its NVLink interconnect and mature CUDA ecosystem. AMD's MI300X offers compelling value for inference workloads where its larger HBM pool reduces the need for model parallelism. Google's TPU v5p is optimized for internal workloads with tight integration into GCP infrastructure. Custom silicon from AWS (Trainium 2), Microsoft (Maia 100), and Meta (MTIA v2) trades general-purpose flexibility for workload-specific efficiency.
TCO Beyond Unit Price
Total cost of ownership encompasses the chip price, server infrastructure, networking, power, cooling, software licensing, and operational overhead. A chip that costs 30% less per unit but requires 2x the networking investment may not deliver savings at cluster scale. This tool helps model these tradeoffs by comparing accelerators across multiple cost-performance axes simultaneously.
Related: Cost Bridge Chart · Chip Price Calculator · HBM Market Analysis
AI Accelerator Price/Performance FAQ
- Which AI accelerator has the best price-performance ratio?
- The best price-performance ratio depends on the workload. For FP16 training, NVIDIA B200 and AMD MI300X lead in TFLOPS/dollar. For inference throughput, Groq LPU and AWS Trainium 2 offer competitive tokens-per-dollar. Use our interactive frontier tool to compare chips across your specific metrics.
- How much does an NVIDIA H100 cost vs B200?
- An NVIDIA H100 SXM5 has an estimated manufacturing cost of ~$3,300 and sells at ~$25,000–30,000. The B200, with dual Blackwell dies and 12-high HBM3E stacks, has an estimated manufacturing cost of ~$5,500–7,000 and list price of ~$30,000–40,000. The B200 delivers roughly 2.5× the training performance of the H100.
- What is total cost of ownership (TCO) for AI accelerators?
- AI accelerator TCO includes the chip cost, server/board costs, networking, electricity, cooling, rack space, and maintenance over the deployment lifetime (typically 3–5 years). Electricity and cooling can represent 30–50% of lifetime TCO for large GPU clusters. Our tool models TCO at cluster scales from 1 to 16,384 chips.