Jensen Huang pulled a chip out of his pocket and held it next to a Hopper chip. The Hopper looked small. That was the opening gesture of Nvidia’s GTC keynote on March 18, 2024, where the company announced Blackwell, its new GPU architecture, before a crowd of more than 12,000 people at the SAP Center in Silicon Valley.
“We need bigger GPUs,” Huang said. Blackwell is his answer.
What the name means and where it came from
The architecture is named for David Blackwell, a University of California, Berkeley mathematician known for work in game theory and statistics. He was the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. Blackwell succeeds Hopper, which launched two years earlier, and Ada Lovelace.
The name was no surprise. It leaked in 2022, and Nvidia’s October 2023 investor presentation put the B100 and B40 accelerators on an official roadmap. Before that, Hopper’s successor appeared on roadmaps only as “Hopper-Next.” The updated roadmap also moved data-center products from a two-year release cycle to a yearly one.
The numbers Nvidia put up
Nvidia says Blackwell delivers 2.5 times the per-chip training performance of its predecessor in FP8, and five times the inference performance with FP4. Its fifth-generation NVLink interconnect runs twice as fast as Hopper’s and scales to 576 GPUs.
The GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip links two B200 GPUs to the Grace CPU over a 900GB/s connection. Stack 72 GPUs into a liquid-cooled rack and you get the GB200 NVL72, which Nvidia rates at 720 petaflops of training performance and 1.4 exaflops of inference. Huang said the machine packs 600,000 parts and weighs 3,000 pounds. “There are only a couple, maybe three exaflop machines on the planet as we speak,” he said.
Nvidia also announced a DGX SuperPOD built on GB200 chips, rated at 11.5 exaflops at FP4 precision.
Demand for the previous generation sets the bar. H100 servers had delivery lead times of 36 to 52 weeks, and Nvidia reportedly sold 500,000 H100 accelerators in the third quarter of 2023 alone. The company’s market capitalization had by then passed $2 trillion, behind only Microsoft and Apple.
Customers lined up, gamers left out
Nvidia’s press release carried endorsements from Sundar Pichai of Google, Andy Jassy of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Elon Musk, among others. Huang called the whole industry “gearing up for Blackwell” and said it would be the most successful launch in the company’s history. That is Nvidia’s claim, and nothing in the keynote tested it.
The catch for anyone hoping for a new graphics card: the keynote never mentioned gaming.
Sources
- Blackwell (microarchitecture) – Wikipedia
- GTC Wrap-Up: ‘We Created a Processor for the Generative AI Era,’ NVIDIA CEO Says
