by Angela Guess
Don Clark reports in The Wall Street Journal, “Nvidia Corp. is stepping up plans to expand beyond computer graphics into the field of artificial intelligence, unveiling an unusual processor for the purpose and a computer that uses it to solve scientific problems at extremely high speed. The company on Tuesday said the new Tesla P100 chip, designed for use in corporate data centers, achieves very high performance by packing 15 billion transistors on a piece of silicon. That is roughly twice as many as Nvidia’s prior high-end graphics processor and some new server chips Intel Corp. announced last week. ‘It’s the largest chip that has ever been made,’ said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, during a speech kicking off the company’s annual technology conference here.”
Clark goes on, “He predicted the chip would initially be purchased by unidentified cloud computing services and next year would begin arrive in servers sold by other companies. Meanwhile, Nvidia plans to offer its own $129,000 computer that comes with eight Tesla P100 chips and software for artificial intelligence applications. Mr. Huang said the DGX-1, as the new computer is called, can process artificial intelligence tasks as rapidly as 250 servers powered by general-purpose chips like Intel’s—an installation that would cost much more. A typical chore that would take 150 hours on one standard server, Mr. Huang said, would take two hours on the DGX-1.”
Photo credit: Nvidia