Think one GPU is very much like another? Think again. It turns out that there’s surprising variability in the performance delivered by chips of the same model. That can make getting your money’s worth by renting time on a GPU from a cloud provider a real roll of the dice, according to research from the College of William & Mary, Jefferson Lab, and Silicon Data. “It’s called the silicon lottery,” says Carmen Li, founder and CEO of Silicon Data, which tracks GPU rental prices and benchmarks cloud-computing performance. The silicon lottery’s existence has been known since at least 2022, when researchers at the University of Wisconsin tied it to variations in the performance of GPU-dependent supercomputers.

Li and her colleagues figured that the effect would be even more pronounced for AI cloud customers. Performance varies for GPU models in the cloud So they ran 6,800 instances of the index firm’s benchmark test on 3,500 randomly selected GPUs operated by 11 cloud-computing providers. The 3,500 GPUs comprised 11 models of Nvidia GPU, the most advanced being the Nvidia H200 SXM. (The team wasn’t just picking on Nvidia; the GPU giant makes up most of the rental cloud market.) The…