Upon returning from GTC24, I've been able to reflect on all the new updates across NVIDIA's platforms and below is a summary of the various announcements.
Blackwell was the star of the show, with the B100, B200 and GB200 chips announced. Note that there were no consumer facing graphics cards (RTX) were named, nor was there a successor to the L40S or BlueField3 DPU (though there was a new ConnectX8 NIC).
As always though, a little bit of devil is in the details - as well as marketing waxing lyrically in the keynote. More on that at the end.
Let's dive in and see how next-gen (green), compares with current-gen (orange) and last-gen (red).
Upgrades to higher-speed HBM3e memory, and NVLink5, running on TSMC's updated 4NP lithography, not N3 like I expected.
Apple seems to have a lock on TSMC's N3 supply, as well as their N3E process, expected to debut in this year's iPhones, so NVIDIA are playing it safe with a node they have experience with, however huge generational increases in power usage as a result.
B100
The B100 chip is designed to be a drop-in replacement for H100 systems, complying with the same 700W TDP. I'm not sure how appealing this solution is...pulling out 1-2 year old ~$35k GPUs and replacing them with new ~$35k GPUs, with last-gen NVLink and InfiniBand limiting its capabilities.