Nvidia founder, president and CEO Jensen Huang talks about the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, on September 27, 2024.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
NVIDIA New chips for desktops and laptops were unveiled on Monday, using the same Blackwell architecture that powers the company’s fastest artificial intelligence processors for servers and data centers.
The company said the chips, called the GeForce RTX 50 series, will come pre-installed in computers priced around $550 to $2,000. Notebook computers equipped with the chip will begin shipping in March.
Nvidia launched the processor at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote speech on Monday.
“Can you imagine, you have this incredible graphics card, Blackwell, and I’m going to shrink it and put it in there,” Huang said, holding up a laptop.
Nvidia, which owns surge The company has a market value of more than $3.5 trillion by selling artificial intelligence chips to large cloud providers and other technology companies, and until recent years it was best known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to power video games. Nvidia launched its first chip in late 1999, designed to quickly draw triangles and polygons for 3D games.
“Of course, at the time we were a gaming company and these GPUs were created to accelerate gaming,” Nvidia senior product director Justin Walker said in a press release.
Wall Street is less enthusiastic about Nvidia’s gaming business these days, given the explosion of artificial intelligence and the growing need for more processing power. exist quarter As of October, Nvidia’s gaming sales accounted for less than 10% of total revenue, while data center chip sales accounted for 88%.
Nvidia holds vast majority of data center AI GPU market, outpacing rivals AMD and Intel.
But CES (formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show) is primarily about consumer products, and the new chips announced Monday are primarily for gaming.
Nvidia said the RTX 50 series chips will support a feature called DLSS 4, which uses AI to increase game frame rates. They can also show more detail on a character’s face and generally provide better graphics and higher resolution to the user.
Nvidia’s gaming business is growing, with revenue in the latest quarter increasing 15% year-over-year. But data center sales have doubled for at least six consecutive quarters, topping $30 billion in the most recent period.
Nvidia said technology improvements made to its massive artificial intelligence business will trickle down to its gaming graphics cards.
“While we are now both an AI company and a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits significantly from the fact that we are an AI company,” Walker said.
The Blackwell GPU architecture and core design used in the 50 series chips debuted in the company’s AI accelerator, Announced in March It began shipping late last year. Nvidia says they are designed and optimized to run OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The new chips for PCs and laptops will come in a variety of different configurations. The most expensive and most powerful chip, the RTX 5090, will sell for $1,999 on its own and is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090, the company said. 208 billion transistors.
Nvidia says the chips will be optimized for running artificial intelligence models and computer graphics, not just the latest games. These chips are powerful enough for some game makers to integrate generative artificial intelligence into characters in games such as “PUBG: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.”
The new processors will also be powerful enough to run large language models and image generation models from: YuanMistral and Stability AI, Nvidia said.
watch: Bernstein’s Rasgon says investors need to invest in Nvidia
