Monthly Archives: May 2022

Digital twins that revolutionize the way the most complex products are produced. Silicon and software that transforms data centers into AI factories. Gaming advances that bring the world’s most popular games to life.

Taiwan has become the engine that brings the latest innovations to the world. So it only makes sense that NVIDIA leaders brought their best ideas to this week’s COMPUTEX technology conference in Taipei.

“Taiwan is the birthplace of the PC ecosystem and the spirit of COMPUTEX is to celebrate the incredible journey that built this $500 billion industry,” Jeff Fisher, senior vice president for gaming products at NVIDIA told attendees.

The headline news:

• NVIDIA announced Taiwan’s leading computer makers will release the first wave of systems powered by the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip for workloads such as digital twins, AI, high-performance computing, cloud graphics and gaming.
• NVIDIA announced liquid-cooled NVIDIA A100 GPUs for data centers. They’ll be available in the fall as a PCIe card and will ship from OEMs with the HGX A100 server. The H100 Liquid Cooled will be available in the HGX H100 server, and as the H100 PCIe in early 2023.
• Partners creating products around the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI and robotics platform announced more than 30 servers and appliances based on the NVIDIA Orin system-on-module.
• Momentum for NVIDIA RTX is growing, with over 250 RTX games and applications available, double that at last year’s COMPUTEX. And GeForce gamers continue to upgrade, with over 30% now on RTX hardware, logging over 1 and a half billion hours of playtime with RTX. And DLSS is in the games that gamers want to play, with 12 new added to the ever-growing library.

The announcements punctuated a talk from six NVIDIA leaders who wove together advances from robotics to AI, silicon to software and highlighted the work of partners throughout the industry.

Transforming Data Centers

First up, NVIDIA VP for Hyperscale and HPC Ian Buck detailed how data centers are transforming into AI factories.

“This transformation requires us to reimagine the data center at every level, from hardware to software, from chips to infrastructure to systems,” Buck said.

This will drive massive business opportunities for NVIDIA’s partners in data centers, HPC, in 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, Buck said.

And 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 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 science, data analytics and AI.

NVIDIA announced the first wave of systems powered by the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip are expected starting in the first half of 2023.

“Grace will be amazing at AI, data analytics, scientific computing, and hyperscale computing,” said NVIDIA senior VP for hardware engineering Brian Kelleher. “And, of course, the full suite of NVIDIA software platforms will run on Grace.”

The Grace-powered systems from ASUS, Foxconn Industrial Internet, GIGABYTE, QCT, Supermicro and Wiwynn 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 Director of Product Management for Accelerated Computing Ying Yin Shih

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 this to run seamlessly requires NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, which delivers robust 24/7 AI deployment, Buck said.

“When it comes to reimagining the data center, NVIDIA has the complete, open platform of hardware and software to build the AI factories of the future,” Buck said.

Revolutionizing Robotics with AI

AI is also reaching more deeply into the world around us.

Deepu Talla, VP of Embedded and Edge Computing, spoke about how the global drive to automation makes robotics a major new application for AI.

NVIDIA announced this week that more than 30 leading partners worldwide will be among those offering the first wave of NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin-powered production systems at COMPUTEX in Taipei.

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 worldwide since GTC in 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 multimodal 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, Talla said.

NVIDIA Isaac, the company’s robotics platform, has four pillars, he explained.

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, Talla explained.

The third pillar is building the physical robots.

And the fourth pillar is about managing the fleet of robots over their lifetimes, typically many years if not more than a decade, Talla said.

As part of that, Talla detailed 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.

And he explained how NVIDIA Fleet Command provides secure management for fleets of AMRs.

“This is the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end robotics platform and we continue to invest in it,” Talla said.

More Power for Gaming and Content Creation

Speaking last, 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, Fisher said.

“Hundreds of millions now count on it to play, work and learn,” he said.

NVIDIA RTX, introduced in 2018, has reinvented graphics thanks to advanced features such as real-time ray tracing — and the momentum around it continues to grow.

There are now over 250 RTX-enabled games and applications, doubling since last Computex, Fisher said.

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.

At COMPUTEX, DLSS is in the games that gamers want to play, with 12 new games added to the ever-growing library.

Among the highlights: the developers of the critically-acclaimed HITMAN 3 announced they 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 over 20M 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.

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 — is delivering a new level of power efficiency. GeForce RTX laptop models now total over 180.

“These are our most portable, highest performance laptops ever,” Fisher said.

These powerful systems are being used to help build massive, interconnected 3D destinations.

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, Fisher said.

Omniverse is getting a number of updates to accelerate creator workflows. Omniverse Cloud Simple Share, now in closed early access, allows users to send an Omniverse scene for others to view with a single click. Audio2Emotion will soon be coming to Audio2Face, providing an AI-powered animation feature that generates realistic facial expressions based on an audio file, Fisher said.

In addition, the Omniverse XR App is now available in beta. With it you can open your photorealistic Omniverse scene and experience it, fully immersive, in Virtual Reality, Fisher said. And Omniverse Machinima has been updated to make it easier than ever for 3D artists to create animated shorts.

“Omniverse is the future of 3D content creation and how virtual worlds will be built,” Fisher said.

“Over the past 20 years, NVIDIA and our partners have dedicated ourselves to building the best platform for gaming and creating,” Fisher said. “Hundreds of millions now count on it to play, work, and learn.”

Featured image credit: ynes95, some rights reserved.

In the worldwide effort to halt climate change, Zac Smith is part of a growing movement to build data centers that deliver both high performance and energy efficiency.

He’s head of edge infrastructure at Equinix, a global service provider that manages more than 240 data centers and is committed to becoming the first in its sector to be climate neutral.

“We have 10,000 customers counting on us for help with this journey. They demand more data and more intelligence, often with AI, and they want it in a sustainable way,” said Smith, a Julliard grad who got into tech in the early 2000’s building websites for fellow musicians in New York City.

Marking Progress in Efficiency

As of April, Equinix has issued $4.9 billion in green bonds. They’re investment-grade instruments Equinix will apply to reducing environmental impact through optimizing power usage effectiveness (PUE), an industry metric of how much of the energy a data center uses goes directly to computing tasks.

Data center operators are trying to shave that ratio ever closer to the ideal of 1.0 PUE.  Equinix facilities have an average 1.48 PUE today with its best new data centers hitting less than 1.2.

In another step forward, Equinix opened in January a dedicated facility to pursue advances in energy efficiency. One part of that work focuses on liquid cooling.

Born in the mainframe era, liquid cooling is maturing in the age of AI. It’s now widely used inside the world’s fastest supercomputers in a modern form called direct-chip cooling.

Liquid cooling is the next step in accelerated computing for NVIDIA GPUs that already deliver up to 20x better energy efficiency on AI inference and high performance computing jobs than CPUs.

Efficiency Through Acceleration 

If you switched all the CPU-only servers running AI and HPC worldwide to GPU-accelerated systems, you could save a whopping 11 trillion watt-hours of energy a year. That’s like saving the energy more than 1.5 million homes consume in a year.

Today, NVIDIA adds to its sustainability efforts with the release of our first data center PCIe GPU using direct-chip cooling.

Equinix is qualifying the A100 80GB PCIe Liquid-Cooled GPU for use in its data centers as part of a comprehensive approach to sustainable cooling and heat capture. The GPUs are sampling now and will be generally available this summer.

Saving Water and Power

“This marks the first liquid-cooled GPU introduced to our lab, and that’s exciting for us because our customers are hungry for sustainable ways to harness AI,” said Smith.

Data center operators aim to eliminate chillers that evaporate millions of gallons a water a year to cool the air inside data centers. Liquid cooling promises systems that recycle small amounts of fluids in closed systems focused on key hot spots.

“We’ll turn a waste into an asset,” he said.

Same Performance, Less Power

In separate tests, both Equinix and NVIDIA found a data center using liquid cooling could run the same workloads as an air-cooled facility while using about 30 percent less energy. NVIDIA estimates the liquid-cooled data center could hit 1.15 PUE, far below 1.6 for its air-cooled cousin.

Liquid-cooled data centers can pack twice as much computing into the same space, too. That’s because the A100 GPUs use just one PCIe slot; air-cooled A100 GPUs fill two.

At least a dozen system makers plan to incorporate these GPUs into their offerings later this year. They include ASUS, ASRock Rack, Foxconn Industrial Internet, GIGABYTE, H3C, Inspur, Inventec, Nettrix, QCT, Supermicro, Wiwynn and xFusion

A Global Trend

Regulations setting energy-efficiency standards are pending in Asia, Europe and the U.S. That’s motivating banks and other large data center operators to evaluate liquid cooling, too.

And the technology isn’t limited to data centers. Cars and other systems need it to cool high-performance systems embedded inside confined spaces.

The Road to Sustainability

“This is the start of a journey,” said Smith of the debut of liquid-cooled mainstream accelerators.

Indeed, we plan to follow up the A100 PCIe card with a version next year using the H100 Tensor Core GPU based on the NVIDIA Hopper architecture. We plan to support liquid cooling in our high-performance data center GPUs and our NVIDIA HGX platforms for the foreseeable future.

For fast adoption, today’s liquid-cooled GPUs deliver the same performance for less energy. In the future, we expect these cards will provide an option of getting more performance for the same energy, something users say they want.

“Measuring wattage alone is not relevant, the performance you get for the carbon impact you have is what we need to drive toward,” said Smith.

Learn more about our new A100 PCIe liquid-cooled GPUs.

More than 30 leading technology partners worldwide announced this week the first wave of NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin-powered production systems at COMPUTEX in Taipei.

New products are coming from a dozen Taiwan-based camera, sensor and hardware providers for use in edge AI, AIoT, robotics and embedded applications.

Available worldwide since GTC in 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 multimodal 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.

“The new Jetson AGX Orin is supercharging the next generation of robotics and edge AI applications,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of Embedded and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. “This momentum continues to accelerate as our ecosystem partners release Jetson Orin-based production systems in various form factors tailored towards specific industries and use cases.”

Robust Product and Partner Ecosystem

Jetson-based products announced include servers, edge appliances, industrial PCs, carrier boards, AI software and more. They will come in fan and fanless configurations with multiple connectivity and interface options, also including specifications for commercial or ruggedized applications in robotics, manufacturing, retail, transportation, smart cities, healthcare and other essential sectors of the economy.

Among the releases are Taiwan-based members of the NVIDIA Partner Network, including AAEON, Adlink, Advantech, Aetina, AIMobile, Appropho, AverMedia, Axiomtek, EverFocus, Neousys, Onyx and Vecow.

Other NVIDIA partners launching new Jetson Orin-based solutions worldwide include Auvidea, Basler AG, Connect Tech, D3 Engineering, Diamond Systems, e-Con Systems, Forecr, Framos, Infineon, Leetop, Leopard Imaging, MiiVii, Quectel, RidgeRun, Sequitur, Silex, SmartCow, Stereolabs, Syslogic, Realtimes, Telit and TZTEK, to name a few.

Million-Plus Jetson Developers

Today more than 1 million developers and over 6,000 companies are building commercial products on the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI and robotics computing platform to create and deploy autonomous machines and edge AI applications.

And, with over 150 members, the growing Jetson ecosystem of partners offers a wide range of support, including from companies specialized in AI software, hardware and application design services, cameras, sensors and peripherals, developer tools and development systems. This year, the AAEON BOXER-8240 powered by the Jetson AGX Xavier won the COMPUTEX 2022 Best Choice Golden Award.

Developers are building their next-generation applications on the Jetson AGX Orin developer kit for seamless deployment on the production modules. Jetson AGX Orin users can tap into the NVIDIA CUDA-X accelerated computing stack, NVIDIA JetPack SDK and the latest NVIDIA tools for application development and optimization, including cloud-native development workflows.

Comprehensive Software Support

Jetson Orin enables developers to deploy the largest, most complex models needed to solve edge AI and robotics challenges in natural language understanding, 3D perception, multisensor fusion and other areas.

“NVIDIA is the recognized leader in AI and continues to leverage this expertise to advance robotics through a robust ecosystem and complete end-to-end solutions, including a range of hardware platforms that leverage common tools and neural network models,” said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research.

“The new Jetson platform brings the performance and versatility of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture to enable even further advancements in autonomous mobile robots for a wide range of applications ranging from agriculture and manufacturing to healthcare and smart cities,” he said.

Pretrained models from the NVIDIA NGC catalog are optimized and ready for fine-tuning with the NVIDIA TAO toolkit and customer datasets. This reduces time and cost for production-quality AI deployments, while cloud-native technologies allow seamless updates throughout a product’s lifetime.

For specific use cases, NVIDIA software platforms include NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Omniverse for robotics; Riva, a GPU-accelerated SDK for building speech AI applications; the DeepStream streaming analytics toolkit for AI-based multi-sensor processing, video, audio and image understanding; as well as Metropolis, an application framework, set of developer tools and partner ecosystem that brings visual data and AI together to improve operational efficiency and safety across industries.

Watch NVIDIA’s COMPUTEX keynote address on Monday, May 23, at 8 p.m. PT.

The future of content creation was on full display during the virtual NVIDIA keynote at COMPUTEX 2022, as the NVIDIA Studio platform expands with new Studio laptops and RTX-powered AI apps — all backed by the May Studio Driver released today.

Built-for-creator designs from ASUS, Lenovo, Acer and HP join the NVIDIA Studio laptop lineup. With up to GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPUs, these new machines power unrivaled performance in 3D rendering and AI applications.

NVIDIA Studio is powering the AI revolution in content creation, giving creators time-saving tools that help them go from concept to completion faster. A host of AI-powered software updates are supported in the latest driver. Notably, dive In the NVIDIA Studio with Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 18 to explore three new features that will reduce previously tedious tasks to simple button clicks.

New Hardware on Display

ASUS recently announced the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo, Pro 16X OLED and Pro 17, plus Vivobook Pro 14X, 15X and 16X laptops with up to GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs. These new systems join the ProArt line as NVIDIA Studio laptops, giving creators a slew of options: professional-grade ProArt laptops with displays apt for film editing; the portable and balanced Zenbooks with beautiful designs and powerful GPUs; and the new Vivobooks, great for aspiring creators or advanced users.

Unleash the full force of your creative ambitions with new NVIDIA Studio laptops from Lenovo. The Lenovo Slim 7i Pro X and Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X (or Yoga Slim 7i Pro X and Yoga Slim 7 Pro X in some regions) come with a 3K 120Hz Lenovo PureSight display, hardware calibrated for Delta E <1 color accuracy, sporting 100% sRGB color space and color volume – for full accuracy no matter the display brightness. These laptops feature up to a GeForce RTX 3050 GPU.

Acer’s ConceptD 5 and ConceptD 5 Pro come equipped with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and RTX A5500 GPU, respectively. Less than an inch thick, their sophisticated and durable metal design makes them easy to take on the road.

The HP ZBook Studio G9 is engineered to deliver pro-level performance in a thin and light form factor. Equipped with up to an NVIDIA RTX A5500 or GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU and professional-grade HP Dreamcolor displays, the HP ZBook Studio G9 offers optimal performance for multitasking, rendering 3D models and using powerful creative tools. HP also announced the HP Envy 16, fitted with a GeForce RTX 3060. With a beautiful design and extended display, the HP Envy 16 is a fantastic laptop for video editors.

It’s Not Magic, It’s ‘In the NVIDIA Studio’

This week In The NVIDIA Studio, take a deeper look at three new features that help streamline video editing with RTX GPUs in Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 18.

DaVinci Resolve is the only all-in-one editing, color grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio post-production app. NVIDIA Studio benefits extend into the software, with GPU-accelerated color grading, video editing, and color scopes; hardware encoder and decoder accelerated video transcoding; and RTX-accelerated AI features.

In addition to the incredibly valuable new cloud collaboration update which allows multiple editors, colorists, VFX artists and audio engineers to work simultaneously — on the same project, on the same timeline, anywhere in the world — the recent update also introduced a number of new features accelerated on RTX GPUs.

Automatic Depth Map uses AI to instantly generate a 3D depth matte of a scene to quickly grade the foreground separately from the background, and vice versa.

The feature enables creators to easily add creative effects and color corrections to footage. Change the mood by adding environmental effects like fog or atmosphere. It also makes it easier to mimic the characteristics of different high-quality lenses by adding blur or depth of field to further enhance the shot.

Object Mask Tracking also takes advantage of AI to recognize and track the movement of thousands of unique objects without having to manually rotoscope.

Found within the magic mask palette, the DaVinci Neural Engine intuitively isolates animals, vehicles, people and food, plus countless other elements for advanced secondary grading and effects application.

Surface Tracking uses the CUDA cores found on RTX GPUs to quickly calculate and track any surface and apply graphics to surfaces that warp or change perspective in dramatic ways.

It allows creators to add static or animated graphics to just about anything that moves. The customizable mesh follows the motion of textured surfaces, meaning the feature works even on visuals that warp or change perspective — like a wrinkled t-shirt on an individual who’s in motion. It also allows for quick and easy cloning out of unwanted objects.

With NVIDIA GPUs doing all the hard work, creators can leverage these newly unlocked features to eliminate long manual work, resulting in more time to focus on creating.

Supplementing Creativity With AI

New AI features support creators by helping to reduce or eliminate tedious tasks.

Updated to version 6.1 this month, Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel AI introduced improvements to face recovery when upscaling photos with notable performance improvements on NVIDIA GPUs. By transitioning the AI models from DirectML to TensorRT, users can process photos up to 2.5x faster, by leveraging the Tensor Cores on their RTX GPU.

Marmoset Toolbag 4.04, available now, includes a ton of new features. One example is Depth of Field in the camera object to include ray-traced depth of field. It produces a higher quality effect with more natural transitions between the subject and out-of-focus areas. The update also migrates the software to DirectX 12, giving NVIDIA GeForce RTX users a 1.3x increase in rendering speeds.

Reallusion recently unveiled iClone 8 and Character Creator 4, along with updated Omniverse Connectors for each. iClone 8 introduces NVIDIA volumetric lighting and GPU-accelerated skinning for ActorCore characters, ensuring smooth animations.

Time-saving AI-features in these apps, including DaVinci Resolve 18, are all backed by the May Studio Driver available for download today.

NVIDIA Omniverse Evolution

Creators globally are using NVIDIA Omniverse as a hub to interconnect 3D workflows. At COMPUTEX, NVIDIA introduced Omniverse features to help creators and technical artists create faster and easier than ever.

Omniverse Cloud is a suite of cloud services helping 3D designers, artists and developers collaborate easily from anywhere. Omniverse Cloud Simple Share is now available for early access by application — it lets users click once to package and send an Omniverse scene to friends.

The Omniverse Audio2Face app has a suite of new updates launching in a few weeks, including full facial animation control and Audio2Emotion — an AI-powered animation feature that generates realistic facial expressions from just an audio file.

The Omniverse XR App (beta) is the world’s first full-fidelity, fully ray-traced virtual reality, allowing modelers to see every reflection, soft shadow and limitless lights — and enabling instant rendering of high-poly models without special imports.

Omniverse Machinima has a reinvented sequencer, as well as animation and rendering features that make it easier than ever for 3D artists to make animated shorts. New free game assets are also now available in the app — including Post Scriptum, Beyond the Wire, Shadow Warrior 3 and Squad.

The #MadeinMachinima contest is in full swing. Easily create an animated short with Omniverse materials, physics effects and game assets to win top-of-the-line Studio laptops.

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