Nvidia launches new hardware and software for on-prem and cloud providers

Nvidia used its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose to introduce new blade servers for on-premises use and announce new cloud AI acceleration. The RTX Blade Server packs up to 40 Turing-generation GPUs into an 8U enclosure, and multiple enclosures can be combined into a "pod" with up to 1,280 GPUs working as a single system and using Mellanox technology as the storage and networking interconnect. Which likely explains why Nvidia is paying close to $7 billion for Mellanox. Instead of AI, where Nvidia has become a leader, the RTX Blade Server is positioned for 3D rendering, ray tracing and cloud gaming. The company said this setup will enable the rendering of realistic-looking 3D images in real time for VR and AR. Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo, ASUS and Supermicro were at GTC and all introduced RTX servers. On the AI side of things, Nvidia introduced CUDA-X AI, which it claims is the world’s only end-to-end acceleration library for data science. CUDA is Nvidia’s language using a C++ syntax to specifically program its GPUs.