NVIDIA GTCthe company’s annual AI conference, just kicked off with CEO Jensen Huang taking the stage to reveal new company updates.
One of the major announcements Huang made was the Blackwell platform, which is a GPU architecture for powering generative artificial intelligence. According to the company, it can run “real-time generative artificial intelligence on large language models with a trillion parameters at up to 25 times less cost and power consumption than its predecessor,” Hopper.
Blackwell consists of six technologies: 208 billion transistor chip, second-generation transformer engine, fifth-generation NLink, RAS engine, decompression engine and support for new native interface encryption protocols.
The company believes Blackwell will enable advances in areas such as data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided drug design, quantum computing and generative artificial intelligence.
A number of companies are expected to adopt Blackwell, including AWS, Dell, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla and xAI.
“For three decades, we have pursued accelerated computing, with the goal of enabling transformative breakthroughs such as deep learning and artificial intelligence,” Huang said. “Generative artificial intelligence is the defining technology of our time. Blackwell is the initiator of this new industrial revolution. Working with the world’s most dynamic companies, we will realize the promise of AI for every industry.”
The company also announced a new supercomputer, the DGX SuperPOD, powered by Blackwell chips. The systems include 36 GB200 Superchips (each containing 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs and 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs). According to NVIDIA, each of these superchips provides a 30x performance boost for LLM inference compared to NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
It can also scale to tens of thousands of Superchips using NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand.
SuperPOD also provides predictive management capabilities to reduce downtime and inefficiencies, and also identifies problem areas so it can suggest maintenance steps, adjust computing resources, and save and resume jobs.
“NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputers are the factories of the industrial revolution of artificial intelligence,” said Huang. “The new DGX SuperPOD combines the latest advances in NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and software to enable every company, industry and country to improve and generate their own artificial intelligence.”