GPU × use-case guide · Code assistant

Is the H100 PCIe a good GPU for code assistant?

The H100 PCIe is a hopper NVIDIA GPU with 80 GB HBM3 (2000 GB/s), 756 TFLOPS BF16 / 1513 TFLOPS FP8, and a 350 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 H100 PCIe measures up.

What models fit on a single H100 PCIe?

Weights only, reserving ~25% of the 80 GB for KV cache, activations and fragmentation. ✓ = fits on one card.

Largest single-card fit: Gemma 2 27B at BF16, Mixtral 8x7B (MoE) at FP8, Qwen 2.5 72B at INT4. Bigger models need tensor-parallel across 8 cards.

H100 PCIe for code assistant, specifically

Code assistant is context-heavy, so the KV cache — not the weights — is what fills the 80 GB. On the H100 PCIe 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.

H100 PCIe pricing across providers

Verdict

With 80 GB, the H100 PCIe is a data-center-class card that comfortably handles code assistant for models up to Gemma 2 27B at full precision on a single card — a strong pick if your budget supports ~$2.29/hr.