NVIDIA Next-Generation Blackwell GPU Architecture Will Launch In 2024

Usman Pirzada
File photo of NVIDIA's Hopper GPU. (Image Credits: CNET)

Slowly but surely, details surrounding NVIDIA's upcoming Blackwell architecture are starting to coalesce and become concrete. We heard of the name a while ago, saw the GPU nomenclature leaked and then heard rumors that NVIDIA is in talks with TSMC to develop Blackwell on the TSMC's 3nm node but this is the first (pseudo) official confirmation that the architecture will, in fact, launch in 2024 as expected.

NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs will succeed Hopper in 2024: GB100, GB102 and GB202 GPUs in the pipeline

While answering a question at the Arete Tech Conference 2022, Ian Buck of NVIDIA reiterated that the company is fully committed to launching a major GPGPU architecture every 2 years and Hopper was released this year. This was in response to potential new developments in 2023 and confirms that the Blackwell GPU architecture will be launched in 2024 (since we know that is the architecture to succeed Hopper), which was the expected timeline based on NVIDIA's historical cadence anyways.

David Blackwell is the inspiration for NVIDIA's next-generation Blackwell architecture.

Q: ....maybe touch on some of the sort of customer reactions to the new products and what you think is happening at the bleeding edge of AI and how you see this all evolving into 2023?

A: .....We are making new GP architectures every two years. We have committed to a new CPU architecture also every two years and it was very exciting to launch Hopper this year."

......"So, I think, it’s going to be exciting, it is exciting and this Hopper transition is just yet another turn of the crank the 2023 will bring even more and we will -- and again, 2024, happy to keep coming back to you guys and telling you what the next thing is as we."

-Ian Buck, VP and GM, Datacenter Business, NVIDIA via Seeking Alpha

NVIDIA Hopper was the world's fastest 4nm GPU at launch and the world's first with HBM3 memory. It features higher specifications than even the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (which contains 16,384 CUDA cores) at a net total of 18,432 CUDA cores. Blackwell will provide significant generational improvement over Hopper (as has always been the case). Four NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs have already been confirmed in a prior leak.

The text string that was initially found in the dump is also given below (courtesy of Videocardz):

Image credits: Videocardz.com

Following is a short bio taken from the Wikipedia page of Dr. David Blackwell.

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first black tenured faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Not much else is known about the Blackwell GPU series at this point (obviously) since it is nothing more than a string of text at this point. All we know is that this series is likely going to be slotted in after the Hopper GPUs (which was released in parallel with the mainstream Ada Lovelace GPUs). It is now confirmed that this nomenclature does not refer to consumer GPUs but refers to the Hopper successor.

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