The big trade show continues through June 7. From The Register, June 5:
We sifted through hours of presentations so you don't have to
Computex At the annual Computex conference in Taipei this week Intel, AMD, and Nvidia showed off their latest datacenter and AI kit, and offered a tantalizing glimpse of what's coming next on their respective roadmaps.
One of the most surprising updates came from Nvidia. Last year, we learned the GPU designer was accelerating its development cycle to support a yearly release cadence. On stage in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave us the best picture yet of the chip maker's plans, including the name of its next-gen GPU and systems architecture - Rubin.
While we often get caught up in the specifications and features of the chips themselves, whether they be the H100, GB200 Superchip, or its Blackwell Ultra sibling, it's important to remember these components aren't really standalone parts you can pick off a shelf. Nvidia's highest-end accelerators aren't PCIe cards; they're entire platforms.
You can't just buy a B100 or B200; they come in packs of eight as part of Nvidia's DGX or HGX platform. And so, Nvidia's roadmap encompasses not only the CPUs and GPUs, but also the system and cluster networking necessary to support deployment at scale.
Looking closer at Nvidia's roadmap, there aren't too many surprises. Nvidia announced everything coming in 2024 back at GTC in March. What is new to the Blackwell line is the Ultra GPU and Spectrum Ultra Ethernet switches due in 2025. We don't know much about this Blackwell Ultra at this point other than it'll feature — if we're reading this right — eight stacks of 12-high HBM3e memory, which should bring with it a sizable bump in bandwidth and capacity over previous incarnations.
The next evolution of Nvidia's GPU architecture won't come until 2026 with the debut of Rubin, which will apparently use HBM4 memory. 2026 will also see Nvidia retire its Grace CPU architecture in favor of a new one codenamed Vera.
Along with the new compute architectures, Nvidia plans to roll out 1.6 Tbps InfiniBand and Ethernet Switches alongside matching ConnectX-9 SuperNICs. Meanwhile, its NVLink 6 switches will see their bandwidth double from 1.8 TBps today to 3.6 TBps.
We'll note that the roadmap Nvidia showed off during its Computex keynote is actually less aggressive than the one pitched to investors last year. That roadmap had 1.6 Tbps networking slated for release in 2025. As we reported at the time, there were a number of not inconsiderable challenges with pulling this off. Most notably, the PCIe bandwidth required to support networking that fast wouldn't be ready in time.
However, that isn't the end of Nvidia's roadmap, which now extends into 2027 with - you guessed it - a Rubin Ultra GPU which looks like it'll have a whopping 12 stacks of HBM4 memory. The Next Platform has more on Rubin and Nv's plans here.
AMD punches the accelerator on its AI roadmap....
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