Nvidia has unveiled some major announcements during this week’s GTC 2024, including the Nvidia Blackwell Platform to boost the ability of developers to build more advanced AI models.
Nvidia has come a long way since it was first set up in 1993 to bring 3D graphics to the gaming industry. Following its invention of the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999, today Nvidia is the third-most valuable company in the US behind Microsoft and Apple, recently hitting a market valuation of $2tn.
At GTC 2024, its annual developer conference, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage for his keynote announcing that with the rise of multi-modal AI – able to process diverse data types handled by different models – the demand for advanced computing infrastructure intensifies.
“We need another way of doing computing so that we can continue to scale, so that we can continue to drive down the cost of computing, so that we can continue to consume more and more computing while being sustainable,” said Huang.
In short, Huang said “we need bigger GPUs”. He then introduced the star of the event, the Nvidia Blackwell platform. This will enable organisations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models (LLMs) at up to 25 times less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor, the Hopper architecture.
“The way we compute today is fundamentally different. We created a processor for the generative AI era,” said Huang.
Huang described how Blackwell also delivers 2.5 times its predecessor’s performance in FP8 for training, per chip, and 5x with FP4 for inference. It features a fifth-generation NVLink interconnect that’s twice as fast as Hopper and scales up to 576 GPUs.
A massive superchip – Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip – connects two Blackwell Nvidia B200 Tensor Core GPUs to the Nvidia Grace CPU over a 900GB/s ultra-low-power NVLink chip-to-chip interconnect.
“For three decades we’ve pursued accelerated computing, with the goal of enabling transformative breakthroughs like deep learning and AI,” said Huang.
“Blackwell is the engine to power generative AI. Working with the most dynamic companies in the world, we will realise the promise of AI for every industry.”
Nvidia said major customers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dell Technologies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla and xAI are expected to use the firm’s new flagship chip in cloud computing services and for their own AI offerings.
Huang also announced dozens of enterprise-grade generative AI microservices that businesses can use to create and deploy custom applications on their own platforms while retaining full ownership and control of their intellectual property.
Huang said customers can use NIM microservices off the shelf, or Nvidia can help build proprietary AI and copilots, teaching a model specialised skills only a specific company would know to create invaluable new services.
