Nvidia wants to further expand its leading role in artificial intelligence applications with the Blackwell system. Blackwell is the “driver of a new industrial revolution” through AI.
The chip company Nvidia wants to expand its leading role in technology for artificial intelligence. Company boss Jensen Huang presented a new generation of Nvidia’s computer platform called Blackwell yesterday at the GTC 2024 trade fair.
Named after mathematician David Blackwell, the platform replaces the 2022 Hopper series, which took its name from computing pioneer Grace Hopper. Nvidia now sees Hopper’s successor system as “driving a new industrial revolution” through AI. The system is four times more powerful than the current generation Grace Hopper when it comes to training artificial intelligence.
With Grace Hopper, for example, the chatbot ChatGPT could have been trained within three months with 8,000 Nvidia chips and a power consumption of 15 megawatts, said Huang. With Blackwell you can do this in the same time with 2,000 chips and four megawatts of electricity.
“Increase the distance from the competition”
The Nvidia technologies originally developed for graphics cards have long been proven in computing work for applications with artificial intelligence. Competitors such as Intel and AMD have so far been unable to catch up. This allows Nvidia’s business – and its stock market value – to grow rapidly. Major AI companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are already planning to use Blackwell.
In initial reactions, experts predicted further success with Blackwell. “We expect Nvidia to not only continue to lead, but to widen the gap with its competitors in the AI space,” Summit Insights’ Kinngai Chan said after the announcement.
Collaboration with Apple
With Blackwell, Nvidia also wants to promote the use of so-called “digital twins”, in which companies can simulate their entire business on the computer. In the future, before you build something in the real world, you will first simulate it digitally, emphasized Huang.
With this concept, Nvidia is also making Apple’s Vision Pro computer glasses more useful for use in companies. Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D environment, which allows companies to create “digital twins” of their products and factories, is coming to the Apple device. The technology is often used in the design of objects. Huang demonstrated it at yesterday’s developer conference, using the example of the South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai, among others.
Nvidia also has new software that can also be used via interfaces via the cloud. Huang was convinced that in the future most content will not be retrieved prefabricated from storage, but that AI software will generate it fresh based on the current situation.