Nvidia’s $3,000 microcomputer makes a splash at CES | Real Time Headlines

NVIDIA After artificial intelligence, CEO Jensen Huang got a rock star welcome at CES in Las Vegas this week Prosperity That makes the chip maker the second most valuable company in the world.

During a nearly two-hour keynote speech that kicked off the annual meeting on Monday, Huang packed the 12,000-seat venue, drawing comparisons to the way Steve Jobs presented products at the annual meeting. . apple event.

Huang summed up an Apple-like tactic: surprising product presentations. He showed off one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using some stage magic, held up a much smaller version that looked like a small cube of a computer.

“This is an artificial intelligence supercomputer,” Huang said, wearing a crocodile leather jacket. “It runs the entire Nvidia AI stack. All of Nvidia’s software runs on this.”

The computer, dubbed “Project Digits,” runs a relative of the Grace Blackwell graphics processing unit (GPU) that currently powers a cluster of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence servers, Huang said. GPU paired with a armGrace-based central processing unit (CPU). Nvidia partners with Chinese semiconductor companies MediaTek Create a system-on-chip named GB10.

Formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is often the venue for the launch of flashy and futuristic consumer electronics. This year’s show began on Tuesday and ended on Friday, with several companies announcing integrations of artificial intelligence into appliances, laptops and even grills. Other major announcements include Lenovo launching a laptop with a rollable screen that expands vertically. There are also new robots, including a Roomba competitor with a robotic arm.

Unlike Nvidia’s traditional GPUs for gaming, Project Digits isn’t aimed at consumers. Instead, it’s aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller companies and universities who want to develop advanced artificial intelligence but don’t have the billions to build large data centers or buy enough cloud credits.

“There’s a huge gap for data scientists and machine learning researchers and people who are actively working, actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don’t need a huge cluster. You’re just developing the model early on. version, and keep iterating. You can do it in the cloud, but it just costs more money.”

Nvidia said the supercomputer will be available in May for about $3,000 and will be provided by the company itself and some of its manufacturing partners. Project Digits is a placeholder name, Huang said, indicating that it could change by the time the computer becomes available.

“If you have a good name, please contact us,” Huang said.

Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in 2019 revenue most recent quarter.

Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business and reduce its reliance on a handful of customers to buy large-scale artificial intelligence systems.

“It’s a little scary to see Nvidia launching such a great product at such a low price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a report this week. He said that due to Project Digits and other announcements, including gaming graphics cards, new robot chips, and toyota.

David Bader, director of the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Data Science Institute, said Project Digits runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used on the company’s GPU server clusters, representing a huge improvement in the capabilities of researchers and universities.

Budd, who has worked with Nvidia on research projects in the past, said the computer appears to be able to process enough data and information to train the largest, most cutting-edge models. He told CNBC Anthropic, Google, Amazon Others are “willing to pay $100 million to build a training supercomputer” for a system with such capabilities.

For $3,000, Bader said users will soon be able to get a product that plugs into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office. He said this is particularly exciting for academics, who often leave private industry to get bigger, more powerful computers.

“Any student who can have a system that costs about the same as a high-end laptop or a gaming laptop, they’re going to be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.

Reitzes said the computer could be Nvidia’s first foray into the $50 billion PC and laptop chip market.

“It’s not hard to imagine how easy it would be to do all this yourself and have the system one day be able to run Windows,” Reitzes wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”

Huang did not rule out the possibility when asked about it by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.

He said MediaTek might be able to sell GB10 chips to other computer manufacturers on the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.

“Obviously, we have a plan,” Huang said.

watch: Nvidia pulls back on CES expectations