Artificial intelligence chips could spill out of data centers, onto desks

Last year, the company released the DGX Station to enable software engineers to experiment with software libraries used in artificial intelligence and improve algorithms before sending them to the cloud, where the software is trained on enormous amounts of data. The workstation contains chips based on Nvidia's Volta architecture and provides 480 trillion floating-point operations per second, or teraflops. The DGX workstation shares the same software stack as the DGX-1 appliance, a miniature supercomputer that provides 960 teraflops of performance. That way, software engineers can swiftly swap software between Nvidia's workstations and appliances, which can be installed in data centers where training typically happens. Nvidia introduced both products to tighten its grip over the artificial intelligence market and promote its Volta architecture, which contains custom tensor cores for handling deep learning.