r/hardware • u/Dakhil • 2d ago

Discussion NVIDIA: "Inside NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra: The Chip Powering the AI Factory Era"

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-nvidia-blackwell-ultra-the-chip-powering-the-ai-factory-era/
49 Upvotes

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16

u/ResponsibleJudge3172 1d ago

Looking at the diagram. Tensor hardware now take a considerable amount of transistor and die space budget. The tensor cores themselves, TMA, dedicated cache for the tensor cores, etc.

Also interesting that SFU unit has doubled in throughput. So even today, the units people look down on ROPS, TMUs, SFUs, are still very important for modern workloads.

ROPS for example, everyone says we stopped scaling resolution so useless to improve, but remember 5090 losing performance with a few missing ROPS?

3

u/NGGKroze 7h ago

Checks out Tensor taking that much space. Nvidia is promoting the future of rendering - neural rendering and Tensor will help there immensely. They are doing the same thing they did with CUDA and DL techs - invest early and it will pay off down the line.

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u/Verite_Rendition 1d ago

Can I say how much I appreciate that NVIDIA has used the same design language for their logical block diagrams after all of these years?

You can look at a Fermi SM diagram from 2010 and directly compare it to a Blackwell diagram 15 years newer. Even though the latter is more complex due to just how much more stuff is on a die, it makes it very easy to compare the two and see how the architectures have evolved.

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u/ResponsibleJudge3172 19h ago

I learned basic GPU architecture design using these as refences. Quite useful, especially has made CPU design easier for me to learn as well.

5

u/EmergencyCucumber905 2d ago

So a Blackwell refresh with more memory and improved performance on Nvidia's FP4 datatype.

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u/bazhvn 18h ago

Equivalent to Super refresh of geForce, but it’s Ultra