h100

The H200 has the same compute die as the H100 and costs more per hour. The datasheet gives two ratios, 1.43x bandwidth and 1.76x memory, and those two numbers decide exactly which workloads pay back the premium and which ones lose money on it.

Decode throughput is bytes per step over bandwidth, price is dollars per hour, so tokens per dollar for a 70B falls out of a spec sheet in ten lines. In bf16 the three generations are within 10% per dollar; fp8 pulls the H100 ahead, and fp4 on the B200 doubles it again. The chain, the table and the caveats.

Decode is bandwidth-bound, so the FP8 FLOPS number that dominates the marketing does not move it. Where the B300 pays is capacity, and capacity converts into throughput through batch size rather than directly. The arithmetic that decides it, and the case where the B200 wins.

The part with no NVLink can be the correct choice, and the reason is the workload shape rather than the specification. What fits on one card, what MIG partitioning buys a multi-tenant service, and the exact point where the missing scale-up link makes the decision flip.