Nvidia has unexpectedly announced "the most powerful PC GPU ever created," the Titan V. At the 2017 Neural Information Processing Systems conference, company CEO and founder Jensen Huang took to the stage to show off the card, which is based on the company's Volta architecture.

The GV100-powered Titan V, which is fabricated on a new TSMC 12-nanometer FFN high-performance manufacturing process, is available today for $2,999. It features 110 teraflops of raw performance, 21.1 billion transistors, 12GB of HMB2 memory, 5120 CUDA Cores, and 640 tensor cores. Nvidia says it has nine times the horsepower of its predecessor, the Pascal-based Titan Xp.

  Titan V Titan Xp GTX 1080 GTX 1060
GPU GV100 GP102-400-A1 GP104-400-A1 GP106-400-A1
Architecture Volta Pascal Pascal Pascal
Transistor count 21 Billion 12 Billion 7.2 Billion 4.4 Billion
Manufacturing process TSMC 12 nm FinFET+ TSMC 16 nm TSMC 16 nm TSMC 16 nm
CUDA cores 5,120 3,840 2,560 1,280
SMMs / SMXs 40 30 20 10
ROPs n/a 96 64 48
Core clock 1,200 MHz 1,405 MHz 1,607 MHz 1,506 MHz
Boost clock 1,455 MHz 1582 MHz 1,733 MHz 1,709 MHz
Memory Clock 1700 MHz 2852 MHz 1,250 MHz 2,000 MHz
VRAM 12 12 GB 8 GB 3 GB / 6 GB
Memory Bus 3072-bit 384-bit 256-bit 192-bit
Memory Bandwidth 653 GB/s 547 GB/s 320 GB/s 192 GB/s
FP Performance 15 TFLOPS 12.0 TFLOPS 9.0 TFLOPS 4.61 TFLOPS
Thermal Threshold 91 Degrees C 97 Degrees C 94 Degrees C 94 Degrees C
TDP 250 W 250 W 180 W 120 W
Launch MSRP $2999 $1200 $599/$699 $249/$299

While it is a 'consumer-grade' desktop GPU, the Titan V is targeted toward those researchers, developers, and scientists working in the fields of AI and machine learning---much like the Tesla V100 announced back in May. No gaming performance information has been revealed, though Nvidia did say the GPU uses the standard GeForce driver stack.

"Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI. We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links," Huang says in a statement. "With Titan V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world. I can't wait to see their breakthrough discoveries."

We still don't know exactly when gaming-focused Volta-based GPUs will arrive; back in August, Nvidia said they weren't in the "foreseeable future." Until they do get here, Pascal cards such as the GTX 1080 Ti remain at the top of most gamers' wish list.

The Titan V is on sale now through Nvidia's online store. It's limited to two units per customer and is only available in certain markets.