GPU × use-case guide · Code assistant

Is the A100 40GB SXM a good GPU for code assistant?

The A100 40GB SXM is a ampere NVIDIA GPU with 40 GB HBM2e (1555 GB/s), 312 TFLOPS BF16 / 312 TFLOPS FP8, and a 400 W TDP. Code assistant workloads care most about low time-to-first-token and high single-stream tokens/sec, since developers wait on completions in real time. Here's how the A100 40GB SXM measures up.

What models fit on a single A100 40GB SXM?

Weights only, reserving ~25% of the 40 GB for KV cache, activations and fragmentation. ✓ = fits on one card.

Largest single-card fit: Qwen 2.5 14B at BF16, Gemma 2 27B at FP8, Mixtral 8x7B (MoE) at INT4. Bigger models need tensor-parallel across 8 cards.

A100 40GB SXM for code assistant, specifically

Code assistant is context-heavy, so the KV cache — not the weights — is what fills the 40 GB. On the A100 40GB SXM you'll trade context length against batch size: long prompts mean fewer concurrent requests. Because it's latency-sensitive, run it at low batch sizes on a fast framework (vLLM ≈ 85% MFU) rather than maximising batch. Size it precisely on the calculator.

A100 40GB SXM pricing across providers

Verdict

At 40 GB, the A100 40GB SXM is a solid mid-to-high-tier choice for code assistant: single-card up to Qwen 2.5 14B (BF16) or Gemma 2 27B (FP8), and cost-effective at ~$1.19/hr.