NVIDIA'S 200-BILLION TRANSISTOR BLACKWELL GPU WILL TACKLE XXXLSIZED GENERATIVE AI MODELS

Blackwell GPU release rumours for many months now, but most are postulating what the GeForce RTX 4090 successor could offer. While that's not focus of today's launch, the Blackwell GPU architecture has finally been announced at NVIDIA'S premier AI conference, GTC 2024. With a headline such as wielding power to drive the new industrial revolution, the Blackwell GPU is shaping up to be a key enabler for accelerated computing, breakthrough data processing, engineering simulation, drug design, quantum computing, and generative AI in a very big way.

- VIJAY ANAND

The internet has been rife with Blackwell GPU release rumours for many months now, but most are postulating what the GeForce RTX 4090 successor could offer. While that’s not focus of today’s launch, the Blackwell GPU architecture has finally been announced at NVIDIA’s premier AI conference, GTC 2024. With a headline such as wielding power to drive the new industrial revolution, the Blackwell GPU is shaping up to be a key enabler for accelerated computing, breakthrough data processing, engineering simulation, drug design, quantum computing, and generative AI in a very big way.

After all, NVIDIA promised to solve data centre woes, and that it did with the Ampere-architecture-based A100 superchip in 2019. By 2022, NVIDIA’s focus was crystal clear to advance AI in a meaningful way to drive the world’s AI infrastructure, and that they did with the H100 Hopper architecture superchip. What better example than Generative AI and large language model (LLM) processing, both of which came into existence by training on and being powered by NVIDIA’s hardware? Today, you can’t escape a day without hearing, using, or seeing the fruits of generative AI and being the “defining technology of our time”, as heralded by none other than Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. It’s little wonder why this billionaire’s personal wealth index has risen tremendously in recent times while his company’s stock prices are at their highest in its history.