Nvidia Unveils Revolutionary H200 GPU, Accelerating the Growth of AI and HPC Industries

Tuesday - January 9 2024, 22:24 UTC - 10 months ago

During a conversation with Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk reaffirmed his belief that extreme longevity will soon be possible and dismissed the concept of overpopulation as a myth. The field of AI is rapidly evolving, with the compute dedicated to it increasing every 6 months. Nvidia's newest GPU, the H200, is set for a 2Q24 release and boasts revolutionary HBM3e memory technology, significantly improving bandwidth and capacity. With competition from other players in the market, Nvidia aims to stay ahead by accelerating its product release cycle, starting with the H200 built on the Hopper architecture.

In a conversation with Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk reaffirmed his belief that extreme longevity will soon become a reality. The technology entrepreneur also shared his thoughts on overpopulation, stating it to be a myth as he believes the world is mostly empty. He reinforced this notion by challenging individuals to fly from New York to Los Angeles and try to drop a bowling ball on a person.

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at an unprecedented pace, with computing power dedicated to AI increasing by ten times every 6 months. In fact, Musk himself became aware of a gigawatt scale AI compute cluster being built in Kuwait, equipped with 700,000 Nvidia B-100 chips - two generations beyond the H100. Its successor, the H200 Tensor Core GPU, is set for a 2Q24 release and offers a revolutionary upgrade in terms of memory technology.

The H200 is the first GPU to utilize HBM3e memory, providing 4.8 terabytes per second bandwidth and a total capacity of 141GB. This is a significant improvement from the H100's 3.35 terabytes per second bandwidth and 80GB capacity. This increase in memory performance will greatly accelerate the development of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), driving the growth of the AI industry.

Nvidia currently holds a dominant share of the AI market, with estimates as high as 80%. However, other players such as AWS, Google, Microsoft, and traditional AI and high-performance computing (HPC) entities like AMD are actively preparing their next-generation processors for both training and inference. In response to this competitive landscape and in order to maintain its lead, Nvidia has adjusted its product timelines to bring forward the release of its B100 and X100-based products.

The latest addition to Nvidia's portfolio is the H200, a high-end chip specifically designed for training AI models. This successor to the H100, unveiled in March 2022, arrives at a crucial time for the AI chip giant. With Intel, AMD, and several chip startups and cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services vying for a share of the market, the demand for AI chips is at an all-time high due to the rise of generative AI workloads.

In response to these developments, Nvidia has announced its intention to accelerate the development of new GPU architectures and return to an annual product introduction cycle. The H200, built on the Hopper architecture, is the first step towards achieving this goal.