It strikes me as pretty awesome that the V100 is now available for only $3k in the Titan V, rather than ~$10k for the Tesla V100. I reckon you need to readjust your expectations.
> and are outraged when reality doesn't meet your expectations.
Untrue. I want an option, any option that allows researchers to develop for the fancy high-end chips -- especially when they claim that they want to and are providing such an option. Computational scientist and HPC researchers who aim to write code for, or porting community codes to machines like DOE Sierra, Summit or future V100-based machines need something that is within the reach of a junior PI, a researcher in countries less well off than the rich western Universities and research institutes.
In contrast, jack up the price this high means that the Facebook et. al will still find it worthwhile, but the grand majority of actual researchers, those that they claim to be enabling and helping with this card will not be able to afford it.
It all too easy to forget how the "democratization" of supercomputing was NVIDIA's slogan very ambitious and cool [1] that has over time turned into a marketing claim [2] that offers little in terms of bottom-up enabling the community.
[1] http://gpgpu.org/static/asplos2008/ASPLOS08-1-intro-overview... [2] http://assets.nvidia.com/nv/tesla/pdf/NVIDIA_Accelerate%20Yo...
A new assistant professor at a medium sized school in North America can afford a few of these.
This is a cheap bit of equipment for a professional researcher.
It’s an expensive bit of equipment for an independent researcher or student, or someone in a poorer part of the world. But why would anyone expect the best kit for hobby prices?
(In case if this all leaves you baffled, e.g. assistant professors will often earn 2-4 TITAN V's worth of money per year in places like Eastern Europe -- and that's still on the map of the "Western world" by most definitions.)
> It’s an expensive bit of equipment for an independent researcher or student, or someone in a poorer part of the world.
Allow me to correct you: that is _much_ (if not most) of the world.
> But why would anyone expect the best kit for hobby prices?
Strawmen. Please read my point again (and see the concrete examples of affordable "kit" that can be used to target the high-end HPC iron).