Nvidia’s Blackwell AI ‘superchip’ is the most powerful yet
A computer chip featuring over 400 billion transistors can train artificial intelligence models faster and using less energy, says Nvidia – but it is yet to reveal the price tag
By Jeremy Hsu
19 March 2024
The Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip
Nvidia
Nvidia has unveiled a “superchip” for training artificial intelligence models, the most powerful it has ever produced. The US computing firm, which has recently rocketed in value to become the world’s third-largest company, has yet to reveal the cost of its new chips, but observers expect a high price tag that will make them accessible to only a few organisations.
The chips were announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a press conference in San Jose, California, on 18 March. He showed off the company’s new Blackwell B200 graphics processing units (GPUs), each of which has 208 billion transistors – the tiny switches at the heart of modern computing devices – compared with the 80 billion transistors of Nvidia’s current-generation Hopper chips. He also revealed the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which combines two of the B200 chips.
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“Blackwell is just going to be an amazing system for generative AI,” said Huang. “And in the future, data centres are going to be thought of as AI factories.”
GPUs have become coveted hardware for any organisation seeking to train large AI models. During AI chip shortages in 2023, Elon Musk spoke of GPUs being “considerably harder to get than drugs” and some academic researchers without access bemoaned being “GPU poor”.
Nvidia claims its Blackwell chips can deliver 30 times performance improvement when running generative AI services based on large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 compared with Hopper GPUs, all while using 25 times less energy.
