NVIDIA is pushing itself in the AI market, but thanks to huge profits it also has the means to develop in other segments. One of them is to be processors for PC computers, which are becoming more and more realistic.
During CES, in addition to new graphics cards, NVIDIA also presented an inconspicuous device called Project DIGITS. It is a small computer intended mainly for developers working on the development of AI systems. The GB10 chip based on the Blackwell architecture is installed in a housing not much larger than a Mac Mini, which offers 1 petaflops performance in AI tasks with FP4 precision. Thanks to this, it is able to handle AI models consisting of up to 200 billion parameters. To have a point of reference, Llama 3.1 from Meta has 405 billion parameters, so the capabilities of the NVIDIA chip are quite large. In addition, for USD 3,000 we also get 128 GB of unified LPDDR5X RAM and up to 4 TB of disk space. However, we are more interested in the processor used in this computer.
DIGITS is just the beginning
NVIDIA DIGITS will probably be of interest to a wide group, but professional users, because the price of $3,000 will certainly discourage home users. However, this is only the first step, which was indirectly confirmed by Jensen Huang in an interview for Reuters. The GB10 system used in the DIGITS computer, apart from the GPU, also has a CPU codenamed Grace, which NVIDIA created in cooperation with MediaTek. This processor is to have as many as 20 ARM cores with high energy efficiency and should successfully work with Windows. Combined with a slightly weaker GPU from NVIDIA, this may be quite an interesting proposition, because as Qualcomm has shown, the market for Windows computers with ARM processors is looking better and better.
NVIDIA is not revealing any specific plans yet. Moreover, from the words of the company’s president it can be concluded that MediaTek can offer its processor independently, so it is almost certain that this system will also appear in other devices, not only in the DIGITS computer. This one, however, is to reach the first customers only in May this year and will be based on a specially prepared Linux distribution. It is difficult to estimate at this point whether the NVIDIA processor based on the ARM architecture will be available to a wider consumer offer this year, but I am practically certain that we will hear about it more than once in the next 12 months.
Source: antyweb.pl
