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Nvidia’s Blackwell Platform Ushers in Era of AI Factories
Nvidia, having recently surpassed a $2 trillion market cap fueled by its dominance in the AI chip market, particularly the powerful H100, continues to push boundaries. At GTC 2024, the company unveiled the Blackwell platform, a next-generation architecture specifically optimized for artificial intelligence tasks. Named after mathematician David Blackwell, Blackwell succeeds the Hopper architecture, which debuted in 2022 and forms the foundation for the H100 GPU chip.
However, Nvidia emphasizes Blackwell as more than just a new GPU chip. “Blackwell’s not a chip, it’s the name of a platform,” stated CEO Jensen Huang. “Hopper is fantastic, but we need bigger GPUs.”
1- B200: the largest and most effective chip
Competitors did not succeed in overthrowing the H100 chip, so NVIDIA decided to do it itself. B200 is not a single chip, but rather a multi-die architecture that combines two dies into one GPU. These dies are connected with a high-speed NV-HBI connection of up to 10 terabytes per second, which makes them work exactly as a single chip. This approach bypasses the limitations of current single-chip manufacturing for AI tasks.
The Taiwanese company TSMC manufactures the B200 with a 4NP process dedicated to NVIDIA. It contains a total of 208…
