Nvidia’s new Spectrum-X and Quantum-X photonic switches
Nvidia used its GTC convention at the moment to introduce new GPU superchips, together with the second technology of its present Grace Blackwell chip, in addition to the subsequent technology, dubbed the Vera Rubin. Jensen Huang, the corporate’s founder and CEO, additionally touted new DGX techniques and mentioned how the ability crunch is driving Nvidia to make use of photonics to extra knowledge extra effectively.
Nvidia is a GPU firm, so naturally everybody on the GPU Expertise Convention (GTC) needed to listen to what Nvidia had up its GPU sleeves. Huang delivered that, and extra, throughout a two-hour-plus keynote deal with at a packed SAP Heart in downtown San Jose, California.
Anticipated within the second half of 2026, Rubin will sport 288GB of high-bandwidth reminiscence 4 (HBM4) versus the HBM3e discovered within the Blackwell Extremely, which the corporate additionally introduced at the moment. Will probably be manufactured by TSMC utilizing a 3nm course of, as Huang first disclosed again in 2024.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced the Vera Rubin at GTC 2025
Nvidia will pair Rubin GPUs together with CPUs, dubbed Vera. Nvidia’s latest CPU will sport 88 customized Arm cores and have 4.2 occasions the RAM in Grace (its present CPU) and a couple of.4 occasions the reminiscence bandwidth. General, Vera will ship twice the efficiency of Grace, Nvidia stated.
Nvidia will mix the Vera and Rubin chips collectively, simply because it has with Grace Blackwell, to ship a superchip that has one CPU and two fused GPUs. Nvidia plans to ship the primary technology of its Vera Rubin superchip within the second half of 2026. It plans to comply with that up with its second technology Vera Rubin superchip, dubbed Vera Rubin Extremely, which sports activities 4 GPUs.
The brand new technology of chips, together with Blackwell Extremely and Rubin, will ship large will increase in compute capability. In comparison with the earlier technology of Hopper chips, Blackwell is delivering a 68x speedup, whereas Rubin will ship a 900x speedup, in keeping with Huang. By way of price-performance, Blackwell will value 0.13 what Hopper value, whereas Rubin will push the margin to 0.03.
Nvidia is chasing burgeoning generative AI workloads, together with coaching large AI fashions in addition to working inference workloads. Whereas coaching an AI mannequin could take weeks or months and require enormous quantities of knowledge, inference workloads are anticipated to drive enormous multiples of the coaching workloads.
The emergence of agentic AI, whereby reasoning fashions deal with extra complicated duties on behalf of people, will drive important cycles for the GPU maker, Huang stated. “Compute for agentic AI is 100x what we thought we wanted final 12 months,” he stated throughout the keynote.
Rubin is the subsequent technology of Nvidia’s GPU
How corporations construct knowledge facilities to help agentic AI can also be altering. In response to Huang, the information facilities have gotten AI factories that generate tokens.
“We’re seeing the inflection level taking place within the knowledge middle buildouts,” Huang stated.. “They’re AI factories as a result of it has one job and one job solely: Producing these unbelievable tokens that we then reconstitute into music, into phrases, into movies, into analysis into chemical substances and proteins.”
The large calls for of those AI factories will bump up in opposition to vitality provides, thereby driving demand for larger effectivity. A method that Nvidia plans to spice up the effectivity is by adopting optical-based networking know-how to maneuver knowledge between GPUs.
Huang demonstrated the brand new photonic {hardware} that it co-developed for DGX techniques with ecosystem companions–together with serializers/deserializers (SerDes), lasers, and glass–that can transfer these bits at a fraction of the price of straight copper. The primary technology of the brand new photonics, dubbed Spectrum-X, will ship within the second half of 2025. The second technology, dubbed Quantum-X, will ship within the second half of 2026.
“That is actually loopy know-how, loopy, loopy know-how,” Huang stated throughout the keynote. “It’s the world’s first 1.6 terabit per second CPU. It’s primarily based on a know-how known as microwave resonator modulator, and it’s utterly constructed with this unbelievable course of know-how at TSMC that we’ve been working with for a while.”
Keep tuned for extra protection of Nvidia’s GTC convention.
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