Yes, you can. The problem starts when "you" are a large company -- NVidia restricts "datacenter" use of consumer GPUs (see previous HN discussion of that one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587 ). A single Titan V is somewhere in the 90% range of a V100 at less than 1/3 the cost, and a 1080ti, if you can find one, likely offers a slightly better price/performance spot. 4-GPU training may suffer due the lack of NVlink, but not enough for it to matter too much. As you scale, though, the lack of NVlink will hurt more. And, of course, all of these things come with a capex vs opex tradeoff, and a sysadmin vs cloud tradeoff, that will appeal differently to different situations.

With a mining exception for some reason, and their drivers blocking themselves when running in a virtualized environment unless you do some hacks.

The new "datacenter" restriction only applies to GeForce branded cards. The Titan V is now called the "NVIDIA Titan V" and with no GeForce branding to be found anywhere.

So the restriction applies to the 1080ti but _not_ the titan V. I completely agree the restriction is total bullshit but it's important to get the facts straight.

Not according to the statement from NVidia quoted in this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/nvidia-limits-data-center-us...

It applies to both GeForce and Titan.

You're right - it seems like they have added "Titan" to the agreement since it was first posted on HN:

http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen...

Thanks for the tip!

Hire people to buy 1080 in retail. This problem is solvable easily.

It's not about getting the cards (though supplies are limited because of cryptocurrency mining, but you could buy Titan V's off the shelf in batches of 2). It's about whether or not you're big enough of a target for Nvidia's lawyers if you violate the agreement and actually build a datacenter out with them.

It's hard to find 1080[ti]+ in retail. Whenever they become available they sell out pretty quickly.

Probably not the best phrasing in the post ("next to buying"). It's only comparing cloud pricing (since the TPUv2 is only available there). If you consider buying hardware the situation is different as you correctly point out.

1080s don't have the "tensor cores" of V100, or NVLink, so they will not get anywhere near the same performance on this benchmark.