NVIDIA announces a spate of new innovations at Computex 2022
Image, clockwise, from top left: NVIDIA VP for accelerated computing Ian Buck, senior VP for hardware engineering Brian Kelleher, director of product management for accelerated computing Ying Yin Shih, CTO Michael Kagan, senior VP for GeForce Jeff Fisher, VP of embedded and edge computing Deepu Talla.
NVIDIA has announced its latest innovations in data center, robotics, content creation, and gaming in a virtual keynote address on the opening day of Computex 2022 in Taipei.
Six NVIDIA leaders teamed up to deliver the keynote address, which covered advances from robotics to AI and silicon to software and highlighted the work of its partner ecosystem.
Transforming data centers to AI factories
NVIDIA VP for hyperscale and HPC Ian Buck kicked off the keynote by sharing how data centers are transforming into AI factories.
"This transformation requires us to re-imagine the data center at every level, from hardware to software, from chips to infrastructure to systems," he said.
This will drive massive business opportunities for NVIDIA's partners in data centers, HPC, digital twins and cloud-based gaming, referencing a "half-trillion market opportunity".
Powering these modern AI factories requires end-to-end innovation at every level. With data centers becoming AI factories, data processing is essential.
These include NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, NVIDIA Grace CPUs and NVIDIA BlueField DPUs as the building blocks networked together by NVIDIA Quantum and Spectrum switches.
"The Bluefield DPU along with the Quantum and Spectrum networking switches comprise the infrastructure platform for the AI factory of the future," said NVIDIA CTO Michael Kagan.
NVIDIA technologies will be featured in a wide range of server designs, including NVIDIA CGX for cloud gaming, OVX for digital twins, and HGX Grace and HGX Grace Hopper for simulation, data analytics and AI.
NVIDIA announced the first wave of systems powered by the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip are expected in the first half of 2023.
"Grace will be amazing at AI, data analytics, scientific computing, and hyperscale computing. And, of course, the full suite of NVIDIA software platforms will run on Grace," said NVIDIA senior VP of hardware engineering Brian Kelleher.
Grace-powered systems from ASUS, Foxconn Industrial Internet, GIGABYTE, QCT, Supermicro, and Wiwynn will join x86 and other Arm-based servers to offer customers a broad range of choices.
"All of these servers are optimized for NVIDIA accelerated computing software stacks, and can be qualified as part of our NVIDIA-Certified Systems lineup," said Ying Yin Shih, Director of Product Management for Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA.
Liquid cooling
To provide enterprises with options to deploy green data centers, NVIDIA also announced its first data center PCIe GPU with direct chip liquid cooling.
The liquid-cooled A100 PCIe GPUs will be supported in mainstream servers by at least a dozen system builders, with the first shipping in the third quarter of this year.
"All of these combine to deliver the infrastructure of the data center of the future that handles these massive workloads," Buck said.
"Finally, getting all of these to run seamlessly requires NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, which delivers robust 24/7 AI deployment. When it comes to re-imagining the data center, NVIDIA has the complete, open platform of hardware and software to build the AI factories of the future," he added.
Revolutionizing robotics with AI
NVIDIA VP of embedded and edge computing Deepu Talla spoke about how the global drive to automation makes robotics a major new application for AI.
More than 30 leading NVIDIA partners worldwide will be among those offering the first wave of NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin-powered production systems at Computex. New products are coming from a dozen Taiwan-based camera, sensor and hardware providers for use in edge AI, AIoT, robotics, and embedded applications.
"We are entering the age of robotics — autonomous machines that are keenly aware of their environment and that can make smart decisions about their actions," Talla said.
Available since March, the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin developer kit delivers 275 trillion operations per second, packing over 8x the processing power of its predecessor, NVIDIA AGX Xavier, in the same pin-compatible form factor.
Jetson Orin features the NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU, Arm Cortex-A78AE CPUs, next-generation deep learning and vision accelerators, high-speed interfaces, faster memory bandwidth, and multi-modal sensor support capable of feeding multiple, concurrent AI application pipelines.
Offering server-class performance for edge AI, new Jetson AGX Orin production modules will be available in July, while Orin NX modules are coming in September.
"Such modules are key to embedding smarter devices in the world around us," said Talla.
The NVIDIA Isaac robotics platform has four pillars.
The first pillar is about creating the AI, "a very time-consuming and difficult process that we are making fast and easy," Talla said, highlighting how tools such as the Isaac Replicator for synthetic data generation, NVIDIA pre-trained models available on NGC, and the NVIDIA TAO toolkit are addressing this challenge.
The second pillar is simulating the operation of the robot in the virtual world before it is deployed in the real world with Isaac Sim.
The third is building the physical robots.
And the fourth is about managing the fleet of robots over their lifetimes, typically many years if not more than a decade.
Part of that is Isaac Nova Orin, a reference design for state-of-the-art compute and sensors for autonomous mobile robots (AMR) — packed with technologies such as DeepMap, CuOpt and Metropolis.
"This is the industry's most comprehensive end-to-end robotics platform and we continue to invest in it," said Talla.
More gaming and content creation innovations
NVIDIA senior VP for GeForce Jeff Fisher, detailed how NVIDIA is working to deliver innovation to gamers and content creators.
"Over the past 20 years, NVIDIA and its partners have dedicated themselves to building the best platform for gaming and creating. Hundreds of millions now count on it to play, work and learn," he said.
Introduced in 2018, NVIDIA RTX has reinvented graphics, thanks to advanced features such as real-time ray tracing, and the momentum around it continues to grow. There are now more than 250 RTX-enabled games and applications, doubling since the last Computex.
NVIDIA DLSS continues to set the standard for super-resolution with best-in-class performance and image quality and is now integrated into more than 180 games and applications.
DLSS is in the games that gamers want to play, with 12 new games added to the ever-growing library.
Developers of the critically acclaimed Hitman 3 will be adding NVIDIA DLSS along with ray-traced reflections and ray-traced shadows on May 24.
In addition, NVIDIA Reflex is now supported in 38 games, 22 displays and 45 mice. With more than 20 million gamers playing with Reflex ON every month, Reflex has become one of NVIDIA's most successful technologies.
The Reflex ecosystem is continuing to grow: ASUS debuted the world's first 500Hz G-SYNC display, the ASUS ROG Swift 500Hz gaming monitor. Acer also launched the Predator X28 G-SYNC display. Meanwhile, Cooler Master introduced the MM310 and MM730 gaming mice with Reflex.
"NVIDIA Studio, the RTX-powered platform that includes dozens of SDKs and accelerates the top creative apps and tools, and NVIDIA Omniverse, the company's platform for building interconnected 3D virtual worlds, are designed to enable collaboration and construction of these virtual worlds," said Fisher.
Gaming laptops continue to be the fastest-growing PC category, and 4th generation Max-Q Technologies — the latest iteration of NVIDIA's design for thin and light laptops — delivers a new power efficiency level. GeForce RTX laptop models now total more than 180.
These powerful systems are being used to help build massive, interconnected 3D destinations.
"These are our most portable, highest performance laptops ever," Fisher said.
