Jensen Huang, founder, chairman and CEO of Nvidia, speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC on September 27, 2024.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Nvidia on Monday unveiled new desktop and laptop chips that use the same Blackwell architecture that powers the company’s fastest AI processors for servers and data centers.
The chips, called the GeForce RTX 50-series, will be preinstalled in computers ranging from about $550 to $2,000, the company said. Laptops with the chips will start shipping in March.
Nvidia unveiled the processors at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang gave a speech on Monday.
“Can you imagine, you have this amazing graphics card, Blackwell, I’m going to shrink it and put it inside,” Huang said, holding the laptop.
Nvidia, which has took off over $3.5 trillion in market cap by selling AI chips to giant cloud providers and other tech companies, was until the last few years known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to run video games. Nvidia’s first chip in late 1999 was designed to quickly draw triangles and polygons for 3D games.
“Of course, we were a gaming company back then, and these GPUs were built to accelerate games,” Justin Walker, senior product director at Nvidia, told reporters.
Wall Street is less enthused about Nvidia’s gaming business these days given the explosion of AI and increasing demand for more processing power. in fourth that ended in October, Nvidia’s gaming sales accounted for less than 10% of total revenue, compared with 88% from data center chips.
Nvidia has the vast majority of the data center AI GPU market, outpacing the competition Advanced micro devices and Intel.
But CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is all about consumer products, and the new chips announced Monday are primarily aimed at gaming.
Nvidia says the RTX 50 series chips will support a feature called DLSS 4 that uses AI to increase framerates in a game. They can also display character faces with more detail and will generally provide users with better graphics and higher resolution.
Nvidia’s gaming business is growing, with revenue up 15% year over year in the latest quarter. But data center sales have at least doubled for six consecutive quarters, topping $30 billion in the most recent period.
Nvidia says the technical improvements made for its massive AI business will carry over to its gaming graphics cards.
“Even though we’re now an AI company as well as a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits tremendously from the fact that we’re an AI company,” Walker said.
The Blackwell GPU architecture and core design used by the 50 series chips debuted in the company’s AI accelerators, which announced in March and started shipping later last year. Nvidia said they were designed and optimized to run the neural networks used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The new chips for PCs and laptops will come in a number of different configurations. The company says the most expensive and powerful of the chips, the RTX 5090, will sell individually for $1,999 and is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090. Nvidia says it has 92 billion transistors, compared to 208 billion in the company’s B200 server GPU.
Nvidia says the chips will be optimized for running AI models and computer graphics, not just for running the latest games. The chips will be powerful enough that some game makers can integrate generative AI into their characters in games like “PUBG: Battlegrounds.”
The new processors will also be powerful enough to run large language and image generation models from companies including TargetMistral and Stability AI, Nvidia said.
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