Not really any paradigm shift since the introduction of Tensor Cores in NVIDIA archs. Anything Ampere or Lovelace, will do to teach yourself CUDA up to the crazy optimization techniques and the worst libraries that warp the mind. You'll only miss on HBM which allows you to cheat on memory bandwidth, amount of VRAM (teach yourself on smaller models...), double precision perf and double precision tensor cores (go for an A30 then and not sure they'll keep them - either the x30 bin, or DP tensor cores - ever since "DGEMM on Integer Matrix Multiplication Unit" - https://arxiv.org/html/2306.11975v4 ). FP4, DPX, TMA, GPUDirect are nice but you must be pretty far out already for them to be mandatory...