Nvidia is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its line of graphics processing units or GPUs. Although the firm had its start in the world of consumer gaming, in recent years it’s grown into a true tech titan with diverse investments in self-driving cars, cloud computing, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. The parallel processing power of Nvidia’s GPUs has proven to be particularly good at machine learning tasks, and its chips are in high demand not only from AI researchers but any business with an interest in artificial intelligence. From 2015 onwards, Nvidia’s share price grew sharply, allowing the company to make some key acquisitions, including UK chip designer ARM, which it announced it would purchase in September 2020 for $40 billion. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who is currently the firm’s CEO. Known for his leather jackets and upbeat corporate presentations, Huang is a familiar figure to anyone interested in tech.
The Information reports Microsoft’s server network cards, which are currently in development, could replace the ones offered by Nvidia and save the company cash. Server cards move data quickly between servers. These new server cards should not only improve the performance of Nvidia chips, but Microsoft’s upcoming Maia AI chips as well.
[The Information]
Reuters reports on Nvidia’s new unit that will design custom AI chips, even as its customers plan for a future less reliant on Nvidia’s dominant H100 AI chips. Those can start at $16k each, and power the majority of large language models in use today, which has pushed its market value well beyond $1 trillion.
Nvidia officials reportedly met with OpenAI, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to offer its “bespoke” AI chip services, as well as businesses in other industries like gaming and telecom.
For context, here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes OpenAI’s once-again leader’s trillion dollar effort to “reshape the global semiconductor industry:”
Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030.
The money is needed to fuel AI’s growth and solve the scarcity of expensive AI chips required to train the large language models that underpin systems like ChatGPT. According to the WSJ, Altman is pitching a chip-making partnership to investors from the UAE, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (again), and TSMC.
Technically, it began a voluntary recall in December — “STOP USING THEM IMMEDIATELY,” it wrote — but now the US Consumer Product Safety Commission is involved. Full refunds or $60 store credits are available. 25,300 units were sold, with 272 reports of loose, overheated, and melted adapters. Nvidia’s own adapter had a similar issue in 2022.
Nvidia has issued a hotfix GPU driver to address micro-stuttering with V-SYNC and stutter when scrolling in web browsers for some systems. The patch also fixes some stutter in Red Dead Redemption and stability issues with Immortals of Aveum. If you’re not experiencing issues then it’s probably best waiting for Nvidia’s next WHQL driver, but if you’re eager for the fixes you can download the latest driver from Nvidia’s website.
Nvidia has launched its RTX 4080 Super GPUs today, and Asus is ready with an update to last year’s RTX 4080 Noctua Edition. The Super model includes a four slot cooler with 120mm Noctua fans on top. Asus hasn’t confirmed pricing just yet, but given the $450 premium on the previous RTX 4080 model it’s probably going to be a lot more than the $999 starting price of the RTX 4080 Super.
Nvidia powers most of the AI projects from Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and Meta, but they’re also trying to lessen their dependence on its limited supply. The New York Times explains they want to make switching between Nvidia chips and others (including their own) “as simple” as possible.
As The Verge reported, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is interested in building chips. Microsoft’s AI-focused chip Maia 100 is expected to arrive this year, and Amazon announced the latest version of its Trainium chip.
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Verge Score
Nvidia’s second RTX 40-series Super card isn’t as impressive as its first.
In his review, Tom Warren calls the first RTX 40-series Super card from Nvidia “one that I would seriously consider for a 1440p PC build,” and if you’ve been waiting for a PC gaming upgrade that won’t destroy your budget, this might be the one.
Along with a new Game Ready driver, 4070 Super hardware is now available at stores like Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, and Newegg for $599.99 and up, depending on the card.
Note: If you buy something from these links, we might get affiliate revenue.
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Verge Score
Nvidia delivers more performance for the same price point inside a great 1440p GPU.
Nvidia’s Chat with RTX lets you train your own local chatbot with your own files for free, no cloud required. Seconds after I fed it the Epic v. Google legal complaint PDF, I got decent answers to questions like “What does Epic Games want” and “Which laws does Epic allege Google violated?”
But it also confidently hallucinated that Framework’s Nirav Patel is The Verge’s CEO after ingesting this YouTube transcript, LOL. Maybe I’ll just use it as memory aid for reams of old notepad files?
Monday was quite the whirlwind! Let’s take a step back and recap all of the fun surprises:
• Apple dropped the launch date for the Vision Pro.
• Samsung’s Ballie AI robot now doubles as a projector.
• MSI has a new Steam Deck competitor called the Claw.
• Nvidia revealed its RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super.
There’s still more to come! Stay tuned to The Verge for more CES coverage from the show floor.
Nvidia only just announced its new RTX 40-series Super GPUs today at CES, but we’ve already got our hands on one. The RTX 4070 Super launches on January 17th at the same $599 price point as the original, but there are more CUDA cores to power 1440p gaming. It looks very similar to the RTX 4070, but Nvidia has picked a slightly darker shade of alloy frame.
RTX Remix, which lets modders update older games with visual upgrades like ray tracing and Nvidia’s DLSS, launches on January 22nd in open beta. It made Portal look incredible, and it’s being used to build a community-developed remaster of Half-Life 2.
Nvidia, Twitch, and OBS are teaming up on the new enhanced broadcasting feature that will be available in beta later this month. It allows streamers to transmit up to three concurrent streams to Twitch at different resolutions and quality. This allows non-partner / affiliate streamers to broadcast at multiple resolutions and quality levels. Twitch is also experimenting with 4K and AV1 streaming on RTX 40-series GPUs.
You can read more about Twitch’s plans in a blog post and a support page.
Update January 8th, 1:45PM ET: Added additional links from Twitch.
We’re expecting to see some new RTX 40-series Super cards today, if leaks and Nvidia’s own teasers are anything to go by. Nvidia is holding a “special address” keynote at CES 2024, starting at 8AM PT / 11AM ET / 4PM GMT today. You can watch the whole show below, and stayed tuned to The Verge for all the latest Nvidia news.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati are all on the list to meet with European Commission executive vice president Margrethe Vestager, according to a report from Reuters. We’ll be on the lookout for what (if anything) comes out of the meetings.
Nvidia is heading to CES next week to announce some new 40-series GPUs. A new teaser makes it clearer than the various leaks that Nvidia has some GeForce announcements to make. We’re expecting to hear about a new RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Super Ti, and even an RTX 4080 Super. All the cards have been heavily leaked in recent weeks, so all that’s really left is to make them official on Monday January 8th.
Rumors about the newest additions to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40-series lineup have been swirling for weeks, but now we may have possible launch dates, according to information obtained by ITHome:
• RTX 4070: January 17th, 2024
• RTX 4070 Ti Super: January 24th, 2024
• RTX 4080 Super: January 31st, 2024
Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service now has both Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5. These are the latest Microsoft-owned additions to the service, alongside Minecraft Dungeons. It’s all part of the ongoing rollout of Xbox PC games on GeForce Now, following a 10-year deal between Nvidia and Microsoft. GeForce Now also got PC Game Pass support last month.
Nvidia hit a milestone of 500 games and apps using its RTX technologies like DLSS and ray tracing last week, and it’s continuing to celebrate with more games running DLSS. A new driver (546.33) is being released today and includes game ready support for The Finals, a destructive first-person shooter that shipped last week with ray tracing, DLSS 3 and Nvidia’s Reflex tech. This new driver also includes some important fixes for intermittent stutter when v-sync is enabled.
There was a big shock earlier this year about Huawei’s development, but Nvidia’s CEO doesn’t see it as a huge deal.
“These are just numbers. Is it really 7? Did they shrink it down to something sufficiently good that you can make a phone from? There’s no magic in these numbers. It’s just 7.”
says Nvidia’s CEO at the DealBook 2023 event. “We should try it, we should endeavor it ... but total independence of supply chain is not a real thing for a decade or two,” Jensen Huang says.
Jensen Huang is on stage at DealBook, talking about how soon we might see artificial general intelligence, or AGI. But without a clear definition, it’s a hard question to answer.
One definition is AI software being able to complete basic intelligence tests with results competitive to a “normal human.” Under that definition, Huang says AGI could come within the next five years.
The company’s Q3 2024 earnings reveal $18.12 billion in revenue for the quarter, with $14.51 billion from its data center business as the world’s AI companies jockey for Nvidia’s chips. That overall revenue number is a 206 percent jump from last year and marks a continuing growth trend for the company.
It also noted China and other areas make up 20 – 25 percent of its chip sales, which new US export restrictions will cut into soon; however, the decline should be “more than offset” by growing sales to other regions.
Bethesda has released the 1.8.86 update for Starfield, and for PC gamers with recent Nvidia graphics cards, it should be an important one since it adds support for their cards’ AI-powered upscaling.
It also has a ton of other fixes and tweaks (now you can easily eat all the food you find), but the folks at Digital Foundry tried the beta version of the patch and have more information on exactly the kind of performance bump players can expect.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has just taken the stage at Microsoft’s Ignite event to talk about how the company is partnering with Microsoft on a variety of AI projects. “Generative AI is the single most significant platform transition in computing history,” says Huang. “In the last 40 years, nothing has been this big. It’s bigger than PC, it’s bigger than mobile, and it’s gonna be bigger than the internet, by far.” Nvidia made $6 billion in pure profit earlier this year thanks to the AI boom.
