#IFactorDigest32: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell B200: The Most Powerful AI Chip Yet

Get ready to be amazed!!

At the recent GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2024, 英伟达 , the world's largest manufacturer of artificial intelligence (AI) chips, unveiled the #Blackwell #B200, the company's most powerful AI chip to date.

The new generation of AI graphics processors is called Blackwell B200 GPU, with the first superchip named GB200, which pairs two B200 GPUs with a Grace CPU, set to be shipped later this year

Blackwell GB200 chip, which combines two B200 GPUs with a Grace CPU into one chip.

????This isn't your average chip; it's a game-changer designed to supercharge AI capabilities across industries. Buckle up, because we're about to explore what makes the B200 such a groundbreaking innovation:

Here's why the B200 is a game-changer:

• Blazing Fast Performance: The B200 packs a punch with a whopping 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower, making it twice as powerful as its predecessor, the H100. This translates to significantly faster training times for complex AI models, especially large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 which use trillions of parameters; faster scientific discoveries; accelerated drug development, etc.

??Data Processing: Blackwell significantly accelerates data processing workflows, enabling faster insights and decision-making.
??Engineering Simulations: Complex engineering simulations will become a breeze with the enhanced processing power provided by Blackwell.
??Electronic Design Automation (EDA): The platform can streamline the design and development of electronic circuits, leading to faster innovation.
??Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD): Blackwell has the potential to accelerate the discovery and development of new life-saving drugs.
??Quantum Computing: The platform can play a crucial role in developing and optimizing quantum computing algorithms.        

• ? Energy Efficient Champion: The B200 isn't just powerful; it's also an eco-friendly champion. Nvidia claims it can slash costs and energy consumption by up to 25 times compared to the H100. This is a major win for businesses and organizations looking to minimize their environmental impact while running powerful AI applications

• The Blackwell Platform, a Symphony of Innovation: The B200 isn't a lone wolf. It's part of a comprehensive AI solution called the Nvidia Blackwell platform. This platform includes not just the B200 chip, but also the powerful GB200 superchip (combining two B200s with a CPU) and a suite of software tools specifically designed to optimize AI workloads. This one-stop shop approach makes it easier for developers to leverage the full potential of the B200
• Cloud Power at Your Fingertips: Democratizing AI for All! Major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have already announced their plans to offer Blackwell-powered instances. This means businesses can tap into the power of the B200 without the need for expensive upfront investments in hardware infrastructure ??
• Generative AI gets a Turbo Boost: The B200 is built with a particular focus on generative AI, a rapidly growing field with applications in various industries like realistic image generation, efficient product design and even creative text writing

Hyper-realistic images that blur the lines between reality and simulation Products designed with unparalleled efficiency 
Creative text formats like poems and code ??        

Intriguing Facts about B200 that will Blow your mind

1. The B200 is named after David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, statistics, and information theory. He was also the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences
2. The B200 is packed with a surprisely 208 billion transistors, making it a marvel of modern engineering
3. The GB200 superchip can house up to 72 B200 GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs, offering mind-blowing processing power for tackling massive AI tasks
4. With the B200, Nvidia is aiming to democratize access to powerful AI capabilities, making it more accessible to a wider range of businesses and researchers

The Future of AI is Bright with Blackwell

The Nvidia Blackwell B200 is a significant leap forward in AI hardware, paving the way for faster, more efficient, and more accessible artificial intelligence. While the real-world performance and adoption of the B200 remain to be seen, its potential to revolutionize various industries is undeniable.

GPUs, once only designed for gaming acceleration, are especially well suited for AI tasks because their massively parallel architecture accelerates the immense number of matrix multiplication tasks necessary to run today's neural networks. With the dawn of new deep learning architectures in the 2010s, Nvidia found itself in an ideal position to capitalize on the AI revolution and began designing specialized GPUs just for the task of accelerating AI models.

Nvidia's data center focus has made the company wildly rich and valuable, and these new chips continue the trend. Nvidia's gaming GPU revenue ($2.9 billion in the last quarter) is dwarfed in comparison to data center revenue (at $18.4 billion), and that shows no signs of stopping.

Blackwell Innovations: Six key technologies including the world's most powerful chip, second-generation transformer engine, fifth-generation NVLink, RAS engine, secure AI, and decompression engine. Blackwell’s six revolutionary technologies, which together enable AI training and real-time LLM inference for models scaling up to 10 trillion parameters, include:

Blackwell's Technological Prowess:

• World's Most Powerful Chip: The centerpiece is the Blackwell architecture GPU, packed with a whopping 208 billion transistors. It's built on a custom 4NP TSMC process and utilizes two GPU dies connected by a high-speed 10 TB/second link, essentially forming a single, unified powerhouse.
• Second-Generation Transformer Engine: This engine is specifically designed for LLMs and leverages new micro-tensor scaling support. It integrates with NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM and NeMo Megatron frameworks to enable double the compute power and handle even larger models with new 4-bit floating-point AI inference capabilities.
• Fifth-Generation NVLink: This high-speed interconnect facilitates seamless communication between massive numbers of GPUs (up to 576) for tackling complex LLMs with trillions of parameters, including "mixture-of-experts" models. It boasts an impressive 1.8TB/s bidirectional throughput per GPU.
• RAS Engine (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability): Blackwell incorporates dedicated features for system uptime and resiliency. This includes AI-powered preventative maintenance that runs diagnostics and predicts reliability issues, minimizing downtime for large-scale AI deployments that can run for weeks or months at a stretch.
• Secure AI: Advanced confidential computing capabilities safeguard AI models and customer data without sacrificing performance. This is crucial for privacy-sensitive sectors like healthcare and finance. Support for new native interface encryption protocols further bolsters security.
• Decompression Engine: This engine accelerates database queries by supporting the latest formats, leading to improved performance in data analytics and data science. As data processing continues to shift towards GPU acceleration, this feature will become increasingly valuable.

Nvidia GB200 NVL72 data center computer system.

The aforementioned Grace Blackwell GB200 chip arrives as a key part of the new NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, a multi-node, liquid-cooled data center computer system designed specifically for AI training and inference tasks. It combines 36 GB200s (that's 72 B200 GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs total), interconnected by fifth-generation NVLink, which links chips together to increase performance.

"The GB200 NVL72 provides up to a 30x performance increase compared to the same number of NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs for LLM inference workloads and reduces cost and energy consumption by up to 25x," Nvidia said.

What is Blackwell’s predecessor and how powerful is Blackwell compared to it?The previous generation of AI models, including those trained on chips like the H100, was based on Nvidia's Hopper architecture, which was introduced in 2022. The Blackwell-based processors, such as the GB200, offer a substantial performance boost, providing 20 petaflops from its 208 billion transistors compared to the 4 petaflops of the H100. This enhanced processing power allows AI companies to train larger and more complex models.

How much does a Blackwell chip cost?Nvidia has not disclosed the pricing for the new GB200 chip or the systems it will be used in. However, the previous-generation H100 chip based on Hopper architecture costs between $25,000 and $40,000.

Which major companies are interested in adopting Blackwell?Nvidia expects customers like Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla, and xAI to integrate Blackwell into their AI and cloud computing offerings.

How has Nvidia's growth been impacted by the ChatGPT boom?Nvidia’s shares have surged 240% over the past 12 months, making it the U.S. stock market's third most valuable company, behind only Microsoft and Apple. It dominates the data centre AI chip market, capturing roughly an 80% share last year.

Who are Nvidia’s competitors?Nvidia faces strong competition from rivals like Intel and AMD who introduced new products to the market last year. In December, Intel unveiled a series of AI chips, including Gaudi3, a GPU intended to compete with Nvidia and AMD's offerings. Also, Intel showcased new Core Ultra processors for Windows laptops and computers, as well as fifth-generation Xeon server chips, both incorporating neural processing units for more efficient AI programme execution. AMD also launched its MI300 data centre GPU accelerator family in December 2023, further intensifying competition with Nvidia.

Several major organizations, such as Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla, and xAI, are expected to adopt the Blackwell platform, and Nvidia's press release is replete with canned quotes from tech CEOs (key Nvidia customers) like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman praising the platform.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google:?“Scaling services like Search and Gmail to billions of users has taught us a lot about managing compute infrastructure. As we enter the AI platform shift, we continue to invest deeply in infrastructure for our own products and services, and for our Cloud customers. We are fortunate to have a longstanding partnership with NVIDIA, and look forward to bringing the breakthrough capabilities of the Blackwell GPU to our Cloud customers and teams across Google, including Google DeepMind, to accelerate future discoveries.”

Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon:?“Our deep collaboration with NVIDIA goes back more than 13 years, when we launched the world’s first GPU cloud instance on AWS. Today we offer the widest range of GPU solutions available anywhere in the cloud, supporting the world’s most technologically advanced accelerated workloads. It's why the new NVIDIA Blackwell GPU will run so well on AWS and the reason that NVIDIA chose AWS to co-develop Project Ceiba, combining NVIDIA’s next-generation Grace Blackwell Superchips with the AWS Nitro System's advanced virtualization and ultra-fast Elastic Fabric Adapter networking, for NVIDIA's own AI research and development. Through this joint effort between AWS and NVIDIA engineers, we're continuing to innovate together to make AWS the best place for anyone to run NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud.”

Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies:?“Generative AI is critical to creating smarter, more reliable and efficient systems. Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are working together to shape the future of technology. With the launch of Blackwell, we will continue to deliver the next-generation of accelerated products and services to our customers, providing them with the tools they need to drive innovation across industries.”

Demis Hassabis, cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind:?“The transformative potential of AI is incredible, and it will help us solve some of the world’s most important scientific problems. Blackwell’s breakthrough technological capabilities will provide the critical compute needed to help the world’s brightest minds chart new scientific discoveries.”

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta:?“AI already powers everything from our large language models to our content recommendations, ads, and safety systems, and it's only going to get more important in the future. We're looking forward to using NVIDIA's Blackwell to help train our open-source Llama models and build the next generation of Meta AI and consumer products.”

Satya Nadella, executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft:?“We are committed to offering our customers the most advanced infrastructure to power their AI workloads. By bringing the GB200 Grace Blackwell processor to our datacenters globally, we are building on our long-standing history of optimizing NVIDIA GPUs for our cloud, as we make the promise of AI real for organizations everywhere.”

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI:?“Blackwell offers massive performance leaps, and will accelerate our ability to deliver leading-edge models. We’re excited to continue working with NVIDIA to enhance AI compute.”

Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO of Oracle:?"Oracle’s close collaboration with NVIDIA will enable qualitative and quantitative breakthroughs in AI, machine learning and data analytics. In order for customers to uncover more actionable insights, an even more powerful engine like Blackwell is needed, which is purpose-built for accelerated computing and generative AI.”

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and xAI:?“There is currently nothing better than NVIDIA hardware for AI.”

Nvidia says that Blackwell-based products will be available from various partners starting later this year.        

#Nvidia #BlackwellB200 #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #GenerativeAI #FutureofAI #Tech #Innovation