Nvidia -- Tech Talk -- January 10, 2023

Themes, 2023. 

The Over-Riding Themes

Global energy: the 21st century is America's century.

Medicine: it's all about CRISPR, mRNA.

Information: it's all about semi-conductors, automation, robotics.

For Investors

Investors. 

Chips: link here. Chips, semiconductor: link here.

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TSMC

Two can play this game. Biden signed the "Chips Act" in 2022. Now, Taiwan did the same thing. Link here.

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Nvidia

By now, folks should have a pretty good understanding of TSM.

Now, Nvidia.

First this, which showed up in my twitter feed overnight.

Ada Lovelace: link here.

Ada Lovelace, also referred to simply as Lovelace, is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Ampere architecture, officially announced on September 20, 2022

It is named after English mathematician Ada Lovelace who is often regarded as the first computer programmer and is the first architecture to include both a first and last name.

Nvidia announced the architecture along with the new GeForce 40 series consumer GPUs and the RTX 6000 Ada Generation pro workstation graphics card.

The new GPUs were revealed to use TSMC's new 5 nm "4N" process which offers increased efficiency over the previous Samsung 8 nm and TSMC N7 processes used by Nvidia for its last generation Ampere architecture.

Note: TSMC 4N process (custom designed for NVIDIA) - not to be confused with TSMC's regular N4 node.

Ampere: link here.  

Ampere is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to both the Volta and Turing architectures, officially announced on May 14, 2020.

It is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère.

Nvidia announced the next-generation GeForce 30 series consumer GPUs at a GeForce Special Event on September 1, 2020.

Nvidia announced A100 80GB GPU at SC20 on November 16, 2020.

Mobile RTX graphics cards and the RTX 3060 were revealed on January 12, 2021.

Nvidia also announced Ampere's successor, Hopper, at GTC 2022, and "Ampere Next Next" for a 2024 release at GPU Technology Conference 2021.

Note: TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process for A100.

Turing: link here. 

Turing is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia.

It is named after the prominent mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.

The architecture was first introduced in August 2018 at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the workstation-oriented Quadro RTX cards, and one week later at Gamescom in consumer GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards.

Building on the preliminary work of its HPC-exclusive predecessor, the Turing architecture introduces the first consumer products capable of real-time ray tracing, a longstanding goal of the computer graphics industry.

Key elements include dedicated artificial intelligence processors ("Tensor cores") and dedicated ray tracing processors (“RT cores”).

Turing leverages DXR, OptiX, and Vulkan for access to ray-tracing.

In February 2019, Nvidia released the GeForce 16 series of GPUs, which utilizes the new Turing design but lacks the RT and Tensor cores.

Turing is manufactured using TSMC's 12 nm FinFET semiconductor fabrication process.

The high-end TU102 GPU includes 18.6 billion transistors fabricated using this process.

Turing also uses GDDR6 memory from Samsung Electronics, and previously Micron Technology.