All Nvidia news presented by Jensen Huang at Computex

Image credit: Nvidia

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang said at Computex in Taipei today that he wants to bring generative AI to every data center. In his first public speech in almost four years, Huang made a number of announcements, including the release date of the chip, the DGX GH200 supercomputer, and partnerships with major companies, he said. Here’s all the news from the two-hour keynote.

1. Nvidia’s GForce RTX 4080 Ti GPUs for gamers are now in full production and are being produced in “mass” with a partner in Taiwan.

2. Huang announced Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for games, a customizable AI model foundry service with pre-trained models for game developers. You will give your NPCs even more personality through AI-powered verbal interactions.

3. The Nvidia Cuda computing model currently serves 4 million developers and over 3,000 applications. Cuda had his 40 million downloads last year alone, including 25 million.

4. Mass production of the GPU server HGX H100 has started and is manufactured by “companies all over Taiwan,” Huang said. He added that this is the world’s first computer with a transformer engine.

5. Huang referred to Nvidia’s $6.9 billion acquisition of supercomputer chip maker Mellanox in 2019 as “one of the greatest strategic decisions” it has ever made.

6. Production of the next generation Hopper GPUs will begin in August 2024, exactly two years after the start of production of the first generation.

7. Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper is now in full production. This superchip powers 4 PetaFIOPS TE, 72 Arm CPUs connected by chip-to-chip links, 96GB HBM3, and 576 GPU memory. “This is a computer, not a chip,” Huang said of the world’s first accelerated computing processor, which also has a huge memory. Designed for highly resilient data center applications.

8. If Grace Hopper’s memory isn’t enough, Nvidia has a solution: the DGX GH200. This is created by first connecting 8 Grace Hoppers to 3 NVLINK switches and then connecting the pods at 900GB. And finally, 32 are combined in another switch layer for a total of 256 Grace Hopper chips. The resulting ExaFLOPS Transformer Engine has 144 TB of GPU memory and acts as a giant GPU. Huang said Grace Hopper is so fast that it can run the 5G stack in software. Google Cloud, Meta, and Microsoft will be the first companies to have access to the DGX GH200 and conduct research into its capabilities.

9. Nvidia and SoftBank have formed a partnership to deploy Grace Hopper superchips in SoftBank’s new distributed data centers in Japan. You can now host generative AI and wireless applications on a multi-tenant common server platform, reducing costs and energy.

10. The SoftBank and Nvidia partnership is based on the Nvidia MGX reference architecture currently used in partnership with Taiwanese companies. It provides system manufacturers with a modular reference architecture to build over 100 server variations for AI, accelerated computing, and omniverse applications. Companies participating in the partnership include ASRock Rack, Asus, Gigabyte, Pegatron, QCT and Supermicro.

11. Huang unveiled the Spectrum-X high-speed networking platform for increasing the speed of Ethernet-based clouds. This includes a Spectrum 4 switch with 128 ports at 400GB/s and 51.2T/s. According to Huang, the switch is designed to enable a new breed of Ethernet and is designed end-to-end for adaptive routing, performance isolation and in-fabric computing. Also included is his Bluefield 3 Smart Nic that connects to a Spectrum 4 switch to perform congestion control.

12. WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency, has partnered with Nvidia to develop a content engine based on the Nvidia Omniverse. You will be able to create photo and video content for use in advertising.

13. Robot Platform Nvidia Isaac ARM is now available to anyone wanting to build a robot, full stack from chip to sensor. Huang said Isaac ARM is the first full reference stack for robotics, starting with a chip called Nova Orin.

Thanks in large part to its importance in AI computing, Nvidia’s stock price has skyrocketed over the past year to a current market valuation of around $960 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies (Apple , Microsoft, Saudi Arabia only), Aramco, Alphabet and Amazon rank higher).