On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presented a keynote focusing on the future of AI and new technological advancements. He took this moment to announce Nvidia’s next-generation chip architecture called Blackwell and related products, including the company’s latest AI chip called the B200.
Read this article for quick insights into the key highlights and announcements of the NVIDIA GTC 2024 keynote.
What is the NVIDIA GTC 2024 Keynote?
The NVIDIA GTC 2024 Keynote is a transformative moment in AI. This unique conference brings together developers, researchers, business leaders, IT decision-makers, creators, and NVIDIA’s partner ecosystem. The common goal of the organizer and audience is to learn what’s possible with AI and accelerated computing.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s stage to explore the AI advances that are shaping our future. Catch the keynote below to know how NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform is driving the next wave in AI, digital twins, cloud technologies, and sustainable computing.
NVIDIA GTC 2024 Keynote: Key Highlights & Announcements
Huang unveiled Nvidia’s newest chip, which is 30 times faster than its predecessor at some tasks, on a stage in a hockey arena in the middle of Silicon Valley. Nvidia’s chip and software announcements at GTC 2024 will help determine whether the company can maintain its 80% share of the market for AI chips. Like:
- Huang introduced the NVIDIA Blackwell platform to unleash real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models. He said, “We need another way of doing computing so that we can continue to scale so that we can continue to drive down the cost of computing so that we can continue to consume more and more computing while being sustainable. Accelerated computing is a dramatic speedup over general-purpose computing, in every single industry.”
- NVIDIA Switch and GB200 are key components of what Huang described as “one giant GPU,” the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, a multi-node, liquid-cooled, rack-scale system that harnesses Blackwell to offer supercharged compute for trillion-parameter models, with 720 petaflops of AI training performance and 1.4 exaflops of AI inference performance in a single rack.
- Nvidia and Johnson & Johnson MedTech announced their collaboration to leverage AI to assist physicians in performing surgery. 80% of operating rooms worldwide use J&J MedTech, and the companies claim to train over 140,000 medical professionals annually. The company believes that Nvidia’s AI technology could improve data analytics from devices, patients, and other surgery data.
- In telecom, Huang announced the NVIDIA 6G Research Cloud, a generative AI and Omniverse-powered platform to advance the next communications era. It’s built with NVIDIA’s Sionna neural radio framework, the NVIDIA Aerial CUDA-accelerated radio access network, and the NVIDIA Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin for 6G. Companies can increase the reliability of wireless transmission by simulating real-world terrain and constructing structures with accuracy by using Nvidia’s platform.
- He revealed that in terms of semiconductor design and manufacturing, NVIDIA is collaborating with TSMC and Synopsys to bring its revolutionary computational lithography platform, cuLitho, into production. This platform will accelerate the most compute-intensive workload in semiconductor manufacturing by 40–60x.
- During the keynote session, Huang also announced the NVIDIA Earth Climate Digital Twin. The currently available cloud platform enables interactive, high-resolution simulation to accelerate climate and weather prediction.
NVIDIA NIM, a reference to NVIDIA inference microservices, was also unveiled at the keynote session. It is considered a new way of packaging and delivering software that connects developers with hundreds of millions of GPUs to deploy custom AI of all kinds.- A huge announcement was made for the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip. For the highest AI performance, GB200-powered systems can be connected with the NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and Spectrum-X800 Ethernet platforms, which deliver advanced networking at speeds up to 800 GB/s.
- NVIDIA Switch and GB200 are key components of what Huang described as “one giant GPU,” the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, a multi-node, liquid-cooled, rack-scale system that harnesses Blackwell to offer supercharged compute for trillion-parameter models, with 720 petaflops of AI training performance and 1.4 exaflops of AI inference performance in a single rack.
- NVIDIA also announced its next-generation AI supercomputer, the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, powered by NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips, for processing trillion-parameter models with constant uptime for superscale generative AI training and inference workloads.
- NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud, which will be available as APIs, extending the reach of the world’s leading platform for creating industrial digital twin applications and workflows across the entire ecosystem of software makers. Huang also announced that NVIDIA is bringing Omniverse to Apple Vision Pro, with the new Omniverse Cloud APIs letting developers stream interactive industrial digital twins into the VR headsets.
- Huang announced that BYD, the world’s largest autonomous vehicle company, has selected NVIDIA’s next-generation computer for its AV, building its next-generation EV fleets on DRIVE Thor. Also, during the keynote session, Huang announced Project GR00T, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, designed to further the company’s work driving breakthroughs in robotics and embodied AI.
As a whole, NVIDIA launched more than two dozen new microservices that allow healthcare enterprises worldwide to take advantage of the latest advances in generative AI from anywhere and on any cloud. They offer advanced imaging, natural language and speech recognition, and digital biology generation, prediction, and simulation. In his closing minutes, Huang brought on stage a pair of diminutive NVIDIA-powered robots from Disney Research.
Nvidia CEO Predicts AI to Surpass Human-Level Tests Within Five Years
