The only major difference of the chip is double precision performance, probably irrelevant for the OP's task. And I'm not convinced the difference is in the silicon as opposed to firmware or drivers, games don't need doubles so the NV could cripple the consumer model without consequences, just to differentiate the two products.
Good point. You’re right, they are different chips. But still, the only difference is double precision performance (that’s probably what these extra transistors do), and support of HBM2 memory as opposed to GDDR5X. Pretty sure Amazon/Google/MS would be happy to offer affordable cloud-based GP102-s, if they could.
I am, but I think greed contributes much more to the price.
nVidia also made Tesla P40. It has 100% identical chip to the 1080Ti, same GP102, same frequencies, 100% same specs. The price is around $5000. The GPU is not 100% same, it has more VRAM, but still, that's 8x price difference for almost identical products.
If Teslas would be better, nVidia wouldn't need to put that ridiculous paragraph in the EULA of the driver, about data center usage. That paragraph is the only reason why we don't have affordable GPGPUs in AWS.
1080Ti / P100:
Chip: GP102 / GP100
Cores: 3584 / 3584
Base clock: 1480 / 1328
Single precision TFlops: 10.6 / 10.6
TDP, Watts: 250 / 300
The only major difference of the chip is double precision performance, probably irrelevant for the OP's task. And I'm not convinced the difference is in the silicon as opposed to firmware or drivers, games don't need doubles so the NV could cripple the consumer model without consequences, just to differentiate the two products.