Update March 22, 2022, at 5:00 PM ET: This article has been edited for clarity.
What you need to know
- NVIDIA GTC, a tech conference, is having its March 2022 event right now.
- At GTC, many new products are being shown off, including a new GPU and NVIDIA's Grace CPU.
- Collaborations with Microsoft and other parties are also being detailed and announced.
NVIDIA's GTC conference is here again, this time showcasing hardware, AI solutions, and the various collaborations the company has gotten involved in. This year's haul of news includes two big items of note when it comes to components.
First, get a load of the new Grace CPU Superchip for datacenters. It's an Arm chip with 144 cores designed to put AMD EPYC processors to shame in both performance and efficiency. NVIDIA says it'll be the fastest CPU on the market, at least during its early 2023 launch window. It uses 4N, based on a 4nm process by TSMC.
There's also the Hopper H100 GPU, which will pack 80 billion transistors. It's a GPU designed for supercomputer-tier AI model work. It will sport 3 TB/s HBM3 bandwidth and 4.9 TB/s external bandwidth. Do not confuse the H100 or its specs with the consumer-focused architecture NVIDIA is employing for its 40-series graphics cards, as the two are separate entities.
Those are two of the absolute biggest hardware announcements to come out of GTC, but you can watch the full keynote here if you want a more detailed breakdown of everything announced.
Other news includes the work NVIDIA's doing with its various partners, such as Microsoft. The latter company released a blog post to offer a deep-dive into how Azure uses NVIDIA GPUs to power its confidential cloud initiatives, which are all about ensuring maximum safety and security in cloud-based environments. Microsoft's writeup is a technical one for those of you interested in learning about how NVIDIA tech helps power secure cloud tech, but for everyone else, the point is that Redmond is jazzed about its collaborator's aforementioned Hopper architecture.
It's an exciting time for NVIDIA, even despite the recent corporate hack it suffered as well as the failure of its attempted Arm acquisition. It doesn't look like those setbacks will stop the company from continuing to produce some of the best graphics cards, AI solutions, and supercomputer-geared innovations on the market.
