Jensen Huang, the founder, chairman and CEO of Nvidia, talks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, on September 27, 2024 .
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Nvidia on Monday revealed new chips for desktop and laptop PCs that use the same Blackwell architecture that powers the company’s fastest AI processors for servers and data centers.
The chips, called GeForce RTX 50-series, will come preinstalled in computers ranging from about $550 to $2,000, the company said. Laptops with the chips will begin shipping in March.
Nvidia unveiled the processors at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang gave a keynote speech on Monday.
“You can imagine, you have this amazing graphics card, Blackwell, I’m going to shrink it and put it here,” Huang said, holding up a laptop.
Nvidia, which has he got upset past $3.5 trillion in market capitalization selling AI chips to giant cloud vendors and other tech companies, it was until recent years known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to power video games. Nvidia’s first chip in late 1999 was designed to draw triangles and polygons quickly for 3D games.
“Of course, back then, we were a gaming company, and these GPUs were created to accelerate games,” Justin Walker, senior product manager at Nvidia, said in a press call.
Wall Street is less enthusiastic about Nvidia’s gaming business these days given the explosion in AI and the ever-increasing demand for more processing power. In the fourth that ended in October, Nvidia’s gaming sales accounted for less than 10% of total revenue, compared to 88% from data center chips.
Nvidia has the largest market share of AI GPUs for data centers, outpacing rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
But CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is all about consumer products, and the new chips announced on Monday are mainly aimed at gaming.
Nvidia says the RTX 50 series chips will support a feature called DLSS 4 that uses AI to increase game frame rates. They can also display character faces with more detail, and generally provide users with better graphics and higher resolution.
Nvidia’s gaming business is growing, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier in the last quarter. But data center sales have at least doubled for six consecutive quarters, surpassing $30 billion in the most recent period.
Nvidia says the technical improvements made for its massive AI business will trickle down to its gaming graphics cards.
“While we are now an AI company and also a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits tremendously from the fact that we are an AI company,” Walker said.
The Blackwell GPU architecture and core design that the 50 series chips use debuted in the company’s AI accelerators, which were 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 Gemini.
The new chips for PCs and laptops come in many different configurations. The company says the most expensive and powerful of the chips, the RTX 5090, will be sold individually for $1,999 and is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090. Nvidia says it has 92 billion transistors, versus 208 billion of transistors on the company. B200 GPU for servers.
Nvidia says the chips will be optimized to run AI models and render computer graphics, not just run the latest games. The chips will be powerful enough for some game makers to integrate generative AI into their characters in games like “PUBG: Battlegrounds.”
The new processors will also be powerful enough to run major language models and image generation models from companies including MetaMistral and Stability AI, said Nvidia.
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2025-01-07 03:22:00
