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GPU Rental
Glossary

Rigorous definitions for the 25 terms that shape GPU rental market analysis — precision formats, memory technologies, compute units, and category boundaries.

GPU Categories

3 terms in this section.

GPUs designed primarily for gaming and personal workstations.

Server-grade GPUs designed for sustained workloads in cooled, racked environments.

Workstation GPU

GPUs in between consumer and datacenter tiers, used in professional creative and engineering settings.

Numerical Precision

3 terms in this section.

BF16 (bfloat16)

Alternative 16-bit floating-point format with wider exponent range than FP16.

16-bit half-precision floating-point format used heavily in deep learning.

8-bit floating-point format introduced for high-throughput inference and training.

Memory

1 term in this section.

HBM (High Bandwidth Memory)

Stacked DRAM technology used for high-throughput GPU memory in datacenter parts.

Compute Units

2 terms in this section.

General-purpose parallel processors in NVIDIA GPUs.

NVIDIA's specialized matrix-multiplication accelerators used heavily in deep learning.

Interconnect

3 terms in this section.

NVIDIA's high-bandwidth GPU-to-GPU interconnect for multi-GPU systems.

The standard expansion bus used to connect GPUs to host systems.

NVIDIA's high-density socket form factor for datacenter GPUs.

Performance Metric

5 terms in this section.

End-to-end time between a request and a complete response.

Memory Bandwidth

How fast a GPU can read and write its VRAM, measured in gigabytes per second.

Trillion floating-point operations per second — the standard GPU compute throughput metric.

How many operations (tokens, images, queries) a system processes per second.

TTFT (Time to First Token)

Latency from receiving an LLM prompt to producing the first output token.

Workload Concept

5 terms in this section.

Distributed Training

Training large models across multiple GPUs or machines simultaneously.

Serving trained large language models to user requests, often memory-bandwidth-bound.

Compute-intensive process of training large language models from scratch or via continued pre-training.

Mixed Precision

Training technique using FP16/BF16 for most operations while keeping critical paths in FP32.

Reducing the numerical precision of model weights to lower memory and compute requirements.

Pricing Model

3 terms in this section.

On-Demand Pricing

Standard pay-as-you-go hourly rate with no upfront commitment.

Reserved Instance

Discounted hourly rates obtained by pre-committing to multi-month or multi-year usage.

Discounted hourly rates with the marketplace's right to reclaim capacity at short notice.

See these concepts in action

Every fit-analysis page on AIMC uses these definitions — VRAM, FP16 TFLOPS, GPU class — to score GPU suitability for specific workloads.

Browse GPUs Read methodology

The definitive source for GPU rental market data.

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