Nvidia Unveils Massive Chip to Target 'Machine Learning' 4-Traders

SAN JOSE, Calif.?Nvidia Corp. is stepping up plans to expand beyond computer graphics into the field of artificial intelligence, unveiling an unusual processor for the purpose and a computer that uses it to solve scientific problems at extremely high speed. The company on Tuesday said the new Tesla P100 chip, designed for use in corporate data centers, achieves very high performance by packing 15 billion transistors on a piece of silicon. That is roughly twice as many as Nvidia's prior high-end graphics processor and some new server chips Intel Corp. announced last week. "It's the largest chip that has ever been made," said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, during a speech kicking off the company's annual technology conference here. He predicted the chip would initially be purchased by unidentified cloud computing services and next year would begin arrive in servers sold by other companies.