Nvidia Corp. announced at its virtual GTC 2022 event today that the first products and services based on its next-generation graphics processing unit, the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU, will roll out next month. The Nvidia H100 Tensor Core is the most powerful GPU the company has ever made. Now in full production, it's based on the new Hopper architecture and is packed with more than 80 billion transistors. It also has new features such as a Transformer Engine and more scalable NVLink interconnect, enabling it to power larger artificial intelligence models, recommendation systems and other kinds of workloads. When the chip was first announced in April, Nvidia said it is so powerful that just 20 of them could theoretically be used to sustain the world's entire internet traffic.

Nvidia has announced a slew of AI-focused enterprise products at its annual GTC conference. They include details of its new silicon architecture, Hopper; the first datacenter GPU built using that architecture, the H100; a new Grace CPU "superchip"; and vague plans to build what the company claims will be the world's fastest AI supercomputer, named Eos. Nvidia has benefited hugely from the AI boom of the last decade, with its GPUs proving a perfect match for popular, data-intensive deep learning methods. As the AI sector's demand for data compute grows, says Nvidia, it wants to provide more firepower. In particular, the company stressed the popularity of a type of machine learning system known as a Transformer.

Depending on your point of view, the last two years have either gone by very slowly, or very quickly. While the COVID pandemic never seemed to end – and technically still hasn't – the last two years have whizzed by for the tech industry, and especially for NVIIDA. The company launched its Ampere GPU architecture just two years ago at GTC 2020, and after selling more of their chips than ever before, now in 2022 it's already time to introduce the next architecture. So without further ado, let's talk about the Hopper architecture, which will underpin the next generation of NVIDIA server GPUs. As has become a ritual now for NVIDIA, the company is using its Spring GTC event to launch its next generation GPU architecture. Introduced just two years ago, Ampere has been NVIDIA's most successful server GPU architecture to date, with over $10B in data center sales in just the last year.