Nvidia bets big on AI with powerful new chip

Nvidia has released a new state-of-the-art chip that pushes the limits of machine learning. The Tesla P100 GPU, which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed yesterday at Nvidia's annual GPU Technology Conference, can perform deep learning neural network tasks 12 times faster than the company's previous top-end system. The P100 was a huge commitment for Nvidia, costing over 2 billion in research and development, and it sports a whopping 150 billion transistors on a single chip, making the P100 the world's largest chip, Nvidia claims. In addition to machine learning, the P100 will work for all sorts of high-performance computing tasks -- Nvidia just wants you to know it's really good at machine learning . To top off the P100's introduction, Nvidia has packed eight of them into a crazy-powerful 129,000 supercomputer called the DGX-1, which was also announced yesterday.