The NVIDIA GTC 2016 Keynote Live Blog
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2016 11:54 AM EST02:14PM EDT - Off to see more of the show
02:14PM EDT - And that's a wrap
02:13PM EDT - Recapping: SDKs, IRAY VR, Tesla P100, DGX-1, and autonomous cars
02:12PM EDT - Part of the 2016/2017 Formula E season
02:12PM EDT - Wil; be participating in the Roborace. All cars are PX2-powered
02:12PM EDT - Autonomous race car. 2200lbs
02:10PM EDT - Demonstrating DAVENET AI driivng software in action
02:10PM EDT - Cue "Knight Rider" theme
02:09PM EDT - It took BB8 some time to get halfway-decent at driving
02:08PM EDT - Roll video
02:08PM EDT - So we're going to see BB-8 learn to drive
02:08PM EDT - "Name of the car" even
02:08PM EDT - "We've been working on a project that is really fun. The name of the card is BB-8"
02:05PM EDT - PX2 in the car, DGX-1 in the cloud
02:05PM EDT - (Jen-Hsun is prepared for zoom photos this time)
02:04PM EDT - Drive PX2 uses two unannounced Pascal GPUs
02:04PM EDT - Drive PX2 in Jen-Hsun's hands
02:04PM EDT - Baidu, even
02:03PM EDT - Baisu is working on an NVIDIA-powered self-driving car computer as well
02:02PM EDT - Demoing DriveNet running at 180fps running on the smallest Drive PX
01:58PM EDT - Recapping Drive PX
01:57PM EDT - Up now: cars
01:57PM EDT - Deep learning everywhere
01:56PM EDT - Recap: Tesla M40 for hyperscale, K80 for multi-app HPC, P100 for scales very high, and DGX-1 for the early adopters
01:54PM EDT - First DGX-1s will be going to research universities
01:54PM EDT - NVIDIA is taking orders starting today
01:53PM EDT - DGX-1: $129,000
01:50PM EDT - NVIDIA has adapted TensorFlow for VGX-1
01:47PM EDT - Now on stage: Raja Monga of Google's TensorFlow team
01:47PM EDT - More AI/neural network examples coming up
01:41PM EDT - Baidu is using recurrent neural networks rather than convolutional
01:40PM EDT - Now on stage: Brian of Catanzaro of Baidu
01:38PM EDT - 1.33B images per day
01:38PM EDT - "We achieved a 12x speed-up year-over-year" in deep learning
01:37PM EDT - "Datacenter in a box"
01:37PM EDT - Discussing the challenges in scaling out the number of nodes in many algorithms
01:35PM EDT - Two Xeons, and 7TB in SSD capacity
01:35PM EDT - Quad Infiniband, Dual 10GBe
01:34PM EDT - 170TF FP16 in a box. 8 P100s in a hybrid cube mesh
01:34PM EDT - A full deep learning rackmount server
01:34PM EDT - NVIDIA DGX-1
01:33PM EDT - But if it's 600mm2 for just the die, that's a huge jump in the size of dies being produced on 16nm/14nm TSMC/Samsung FinFET
01:33PM EDT - Need to get confirmation on whether 600mm2 is just the GPU die, or if they're counting other parts as well
01:32PM EDT - "We'll ship it... soon"
01:32PM EDT - P100 servers coming in Q'17
01:31PM EDT - P100 in volume production today
01:30PM EDT - NV wanted new algorithms to take advantage of the hardware
01:29PM EDT - Recapping NVLink. 5x the aggregate speed of PCIe 3.0
01:29PM EDT - "TSMC CoWoS® (Chip-On-Wafer-On-Substrate) services use Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to integrate multiple chips into a single device. This architecture provides higher density interconnects, decreases global interconnect length, and lightens associated RC loading resulting in enhanced performance and reduced power consumption on a smaller form factor."
01:28PM EDT - Chip on Wafer on Substrate, the largest such chip ever made
01:28PM EDT - Er, 600mm^2 !!!!
01:27PM EDT - 500mm^2 !!!
01:27PM EDT - Jen-Hsun is "very frickin excited" about it
01:27PM EDT - Pre-emption
01:27PM EDT - Pascal, 16nm FinFET, Chip-On-Wafer-On-Substrate, NVLink, and New AI Algorithms
01:26PM EDT - The Tesla P100 is "5 miracles"
01:26PM EDT - (150B Transistors is undoubtedly counting the RAM, BTW)
01:26PM EDT - This is using the previously announced mezzanine connector with on-package memory
01:25PM EDT - (14MB is huge for a register file, BTW. That's a lot of very fast memory)
01:24PM EDT - 5.3TF FP64, 10.6TF FP32, 21.2TF FP16, 14MB SM Register File, 4MB L2 Cache
01:24PM EDT - 150B Transistors
01:23PM EDT - "The most ambitious project we have ever undertaken"
01:23PM EDT - Tesla P100
01:23PM EDT - writeln ('Hello, world.')
01:23PM EDT - Pascal time!
01:22PM EDT - AI needs more computing power than what is currently available
01:22PM EDT - "We simply don't have enough computing horsepower"
01:18PM EDT - Teaching AI to draw landscapes inspired by those images
01:18PM EDT - Training it with Romantic-era images
01:17PM EDT - Teaching a neural network to paint
01:17PM EDT - Demo time: Facebook AI Research
01:16PM EDT - Jen-Hsun wants to move from supervised, labor-intensive learning to unsupervised learning
01:14PM EDT - GIE: 20 images/s/W on the Tesla M4
01:14PM EDT - "There's no reason to use FPGAs. There's no reason to design dedicated chips"
01:13PM EDT - (Maxwell powered Tesla cards: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9776/nvidia-announces-tesla-m40-m4-server-cards-data-center-machine-learning )
01:13PM EDT - Recapping the Tesla M40 and M4
01:13PM EDT - Hyperscale is NVIDIA's fastest growing market
01:11PM EDT - Achieving super-human results without super-humans to program them
01:10PM EDT - Side note: bits of this remind me of the hard AI era of the 80s, when at one point true AI was thought to be right around the corner
01:10PM EDT - Talking about how increasingly broad companies are dipping their toes in AI and deep learning
01:08PM EDT - "Cloud platforms of the future are going to be powered by AI"
01:06PM EDT - Jen-Hsun is recapping areas where deep learning has ultimately come up with better algorithms than human-created programs
01:03PM EDT - "Deep learning is a big deal"
01:03PM EDT - "You've heard me talk about deep learning for for the last five years"
12:59PM EDT - Deep learning is key
12:57PM EDT - Microsoft ImageNet has been able to beat a human at image recognition
12:57PM EDT - This year will mark a major year in AI
12:55PM EDT - Up next: AI
12:54PM EDT - Not as capable as Iray VR, but it can handle a single photosphere
12:54PM EDT - Also announcing Iray VR Lite
12:53PM EDT - Jen-Hsun wants to get to the point where he can get out of his car at the office and it'll go park itself underground
12:51PM EDT - (This is on an HTC Vive, for anyone keeping track)
12:51PM EDT - Iray VR rendering of the inside of NVIDIA's new, under-construction headquarters
12:49PM EDT - Using probes to mark out fixed locations. Each probe takes 1 hour on an 8 GPU Quadro setup
12:48PM EDT - Raytracing render for VR applications
12:48PM EDT - Now announcing Iray VR
12:48PM EDT - The Mars demo was running on a Titan, but Jen-Hsun believes that's not enough. Need more performance to better physically simu;ate light
12:46PM EDT - Vendors have been pushing VR as an experience, and this is one such idea
12:45PM EDT - Geeks on Mars
12:44PM EDT - Woz is the first person to try Mars 2030 in VR
12:43PM EDT - Woz would seriously go if it were possible
12:42PM EDT - Jen-Hsun wants to make the Woz the first person on Mars
12:41PM EDT - Steve Wozniak has called in
12:40PM EDT - Demoing Mars 2030 live (though not in VR)
12:37PM EDT - Also in the VR tour, Mars 2030, an 8km^2 reconstruction of the surface of Mars
12:35PM EDT - Roll video
12:34PM EDT - Everest VR will be demoed at the show's VR area
12:33PM EDT - How will VR transform communications, design, and more?
12:32PM EDT - Video games are a very clear use of VR. But what about other fields?
12:31PM EDT - "A brand new computing platform"
12:31PM EDT - Up next: VR
12:30PM EDT - TX1 can process 24 images per second per Watt
12:29PM EDT - GIE is specifically for inference, as opposed to training on cuDNN
12:29PM EDT - NVIDIA wants to boost overall image processing throughput and energy efficiency
12:28PM EDT - New platform: GIE, the GPU Inference Engine
12:27PM EDT - Finally, Jetpack: The Jetson/Tegra X1 software ecosystem
12:27PM EDT - Close partners (JPL partners) have early access to the current testing builds
12:26PM EDT - General release in Q1'17
12:26PM EDT - DriveWorks: SensorFusion, computer vision/detection
12:25PM EDT - VRWorks: VR SLI, Context Priority, Multi-Res Shading
12:24PM EDT - CUDA 8 confirmed to support Pascal
12:23PM EDT - If CUDA 8 is due in June, it stands to reason we may be seeing Pascal around that time in some form
12:22PM EDT - CUDA 8 available in June
12:22PM EDT - ComputeWorks: cuDNN, nvGRAPH, IndeX
12:20PM EDT - DesignWorks: MDL libraries, Optix, etc
12:19PM EDT - Recapping the latest GameWorks features such as voxel accelerated ambient occlusion
12:18PM EDT - This seems to be a bundling of the various NVIDIA SDKs, including GameWorks, DriveWorks, and VRWorks
12:17PM EDT - First up: announcing the NVIDIA SDK
12:17PM EDT - Jen-Hsun will be talking about 5 things: toolbox, deep learning chip, deep learning software, VR, & more
12:15PM EDT - Over 300,000 registered CUDA developers
12:15PM EDT - This despite the fact that they now hold multiple GTCs over the globe
12:15PM EDT - GTC is getting bigger than ever. Twice as large as GTC 2012
12:13PM EDT - Discussing that they do all of this for "you", the audience, and its vast computing needs
12:12PM EDT - Jen-Hsun is now on stage
12:11PM EDT - Self-driving cars, Go, and more
12:11PM EDT - The video theme: AI
12:09PM EDT - Roll video
12:09PM EDT - Lights are dimming. It's showtime
12:07PM EDT - The keynote hall is at capacity, so it's a full house this morning
12:07PM EDT - Everyone is being asked to take their seat
12:05PM EDT - Meanwhile I haven't seen any sign of a car yet, but it would be typical for Jen-Hsun to work a car into his presentation somehow
12:04PM EDT - NVIDIA is indeed running a few minutes late; it sounds like we may start at 9:10 or so
12:04PM EDT - WiFi is being a bit finnicky, but hopefully we'll be okay
12:00PM EDT - Meanwhile someone behind me is discussing the weather. Yesterday it was in the 70s; by tomorrow it's in the 90s. The response from the person next to them: boy, those GPUs sure are hot!
11:59AM EDT - OpenPOWER partners will be holding a keynote tomorrow to discucss the latest advancements in that platform. For NVIDIA it's a big deal as OpenPOWER was previously setup to support NVLink between the CPU and GPUs
11:58AM EDT - On a side note: also taking place in San Jose at the convention center is the show-within-a-show OpenPOWER conference
11:57AM EDT - We may see some consumer news as well, but that's a big if at this point
11:57AM EDT - Some pro visualization (Quadro) news is also likely, given the heavy focus on VR here by the exhibitors
11:57AM EDT - At a minimum I expect Tesla/HPC news on this front, as this is what NVIDIA has focused on in the past, and the HPC market isn't as timing-sensitive
11:56AM EDT - The big news this year will of course be NVIDIA's Pascal architecture, which is scheduled to launch this year
11:56AM EDT - The keynote is scheduled to start at 9am PT, however I suspect we're going to be a few minutes late
11:53AM EDT - Kicking things off as always is the NVIDIA keynote, presented by CEO Jen-Hsun Huang
11:52AM EDT - We're here in sunny San Jose for the 2016 edition of NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC)
48 Comments
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moaklerqt - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
What are you talking about? The Wifi is working fine in the convention center!crimsonson - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
He is talking about HIS connection, not yours?moaklerqt - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
I guess I'll make my humor more obvious next time...soccergirl99 - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
Is that a question?? :)JamesDean17 - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link
Look how nice for them to let that fat Mac guy experience the Windows PC VR Reality he looked so excited about that Windows experience and he even tells us he definitelly wants to go there to the Windows World of Things. Poor guy I guess he just got sick playing that old 2D Solitaire game on his brand new useless Mac the only available game for his machine.He got so excited like he never saw a computer before, well that might be true after all since Macs are more like a fools joke than a computer, 1 April companie fools joke.
I'm not Chatbor nor Cortana just a human being telling you the truth laugh laugh laugh ...... insert more laugh in here ...... no user input needed ...... this is more laughable than ever.
D. Lister - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link
Switch to decaf before you end up with a cardiac episode.Xanavi - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link
He personally designed the Apple II, including hardware and software. This guy pushed technology and progress forward during his time. Thinking of the wrong person fool.osxandwindows - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
Go nvidia.xthetenth - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
You just have all the bad opinions don't you?niva - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
He most certainly does not have all the bad opinions.This doesn't answer the questions whether all of his opinions are bad though!