Computex 2018 NVIDIA Live Blog (1pm TW, 5am UTC)

12:51AM EDT - We're here at NVIDIA for our first Live Blog of Computex. Event starts in a few minutes.

12:52AM EDT - Surprisingly everything on stage is not under wraps.

12:52AM EDT - One wonders what NVIDIA will be announcing

12:52AM EDT - Jensen approached the press crowd outside the event with sandwiches and cookies for lunch. Easy PR move

12:54AM EDT - Disclosure: I haven't had lunch. The sandwich was green. I haven't had time to eat it yet.

12:55AM EDT - Up on the stage is an HGX-2 (OEM version of DGX-2), a V100, Xavier

12:56AM EDT - Isn't Xavier meant to have two next-gen GPUs? It looks like it has the older GPUs on for now

12:56AM EDT - Sorry, Pegasus

12:58AM EDT - Looks like the V100 being used

12:58AM EDT - OK here we start

12:59AM EDT - Jensen is handing out more cookies

12:59AM EDT - Last week we had GTC Taiwan

12:59AM EDT - GTC became world's largest developer conference

01:00AM EDT - More GTC spin-out events

01:00AM EDT - Japan, China, Europe, Israel, Washington DC etc

01:00AM EDT - We know the future of computing is going to look different

01:00AM EDT - First update is on GeForce

01:00AM EDT - Technology demand for the processors is growing exponentially

01:01AM EDT - Second topic is AI, Third is AI implications, Fourth is a new market NVIDIA is pursing

01:01AM EDT - Last year went for thin form factor GPUs with MaxQ

01:01AM EDT - Gaming notebooks at 18 mm, 5 lbs, GTX 1080

01:04AM EDT - The market wants thin and light notebooks

01:04AM EDT - Last year we had 8 MaxQ. Now we have 26

01:05AM EDT - PC Gaming is doing great and is vibrant

01:05AM EDT - Always new things you can do with it

01:05AM EDT - New content continues to get richer

01:05AM EDT - always reinventing itself

01:06AM EDT - In 8 months, PC gaming market increased due to Battle Royale gaming type

01:06AM EDT - +10M weekly gamers in 8 months

01:06AM EDT - Production value of games also increasing

01:06AM EDT - >Gaming is bigger than film

01:07AM EDT - Game consoles create a positive feedback system

01:07AM EDT - Developers have a larger install base for GPUs and gaming

01:07AM EDT - GTX class GPUs went from 17% of NV to 50% in 5 years

01:08AM EDT - This fall will see three games: COD Black Ops 4 (with Battle Royale mode), Battlefield 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider

01:08AM EDT - 'This year will be pretty amazing for GeForce'

01:09AM EDT - New era of computing coming

01:09AM EDT - Two powerful forces coming to change computing architecture

01:10AM EDT - How computers are made has to change - how software will be used has to be incredible

01:10AM EDT - >Bifurcation of single thread vs multi

01:10AM EDT - More demand for computing horsepower than before

01:10AM EDT - DL and AI driving more compute than ever

01:11AM EDT - In time, software will write software

01:11AM EDT - "What kind of computer do you have to build to enable software to write software?"

01:12AM EDT - We are expecting application demand to increase over 1000 in 10 years

01:12AM EDT - We have to advance computing performance by at least the same scale - we do it with GPU computing

01:12AM EDT - Today, talking about 3 phases talking about this new computing model

01:12AM EDT - Phase 1 is for the industry to create the fundamental computing platform, hardware and software, and the tools

01:13AM EDT - Create the ecosystem to take systems over the workd

01:13AM EDT - Now showing DGX-2

01:13AM EDT - Announced before. 16x V100 GPUs

01:13AM EDT - V100 fuses computational with high precision numerics and deep learning

01:14AM EDT - Need to compute at a large dynamic range

01:14AM EDT - Volta Tensor Cores

01:14AM EDT - Volta is 21 B transistors at 12FF

01:14AM EDT - 32GB of HBM

01:14AM EDT - 125 TFLOPS of Tensor Core Perf in one chip

01:14AM EDT - 2 PFLOPS in one box

01:15AM EDT - Parallel computing in two ways on DGX-2

01:15AM EDT - Single model per GPU, or One model across system

01:15AM EDT - Scale out vs Scale up

01:15AM EDT - Scale up is more difficult

01:15AM EDT - Teaming 16 GPUs to do a single model

01:15AM EDT - Requires high levels of communication

01:16AM EDT - Requires software that can do this

01:16AM EDT - All 16 GPUs can communicate at the same time

01:16AM EDT - Same model to compute one vs 16 with DGX-2

01:17AM EDT - 300 servers replaced with one node

01:17AM EDT - Lots of speed records

01:17AM EDT - Fastest single chip

01:17AM EDT - Fastest single chip

01:18AM EDT - Fastest single node

01:18AM EDT - Fastest at scale

01:18AM EDT - Fastest Inference

01:18AM EDT - Highest Inference Throughput

01:18AM EDT - Also DGX-2 becomes HGX-2

01:18AM EDT - Made available for hyperscale datacenters

01:19AM EDT - Six switches at the bottom for the 8 GPUs

01:19AM EDT - at the bottom

01:20AM EDT - >I can't see USB ports

01:20AM EDT - Form factor is as important as the ATX form factor was for desktop computing

01:20AM EDT - "Hyperscale computing element"

01:22AM EDT - Different architectures for different computing models

01:22AM EDT - Architectures of all sizes and shapes

01:23AM EDT - HGX-T1, HGX-T2, HGX-I1, HGX-I2, SCX-E1, SCX-E2, SCX-E3, SCX-E4

01:23AM EDT - All worlds leading server makers support NVIDIA

01:23AM EDT - AI revolutionizing large markets

01:23AM EDT - Hardware, software, deployment, ecosystem

01:24AM EDT - Focused on six large industries for large GPU servers

01:24AM EDT - Supercomputing (CUDA), AI, Drive, NVIDIA Clara, NVIDIA Metropolis, NVIDIA RTX

01:25AM EDT - Clara is a computing system with a software stack for medical imaging, construction, and detection

01:25AM EDT - Taking RAW data for AI implementation in medical

01:26AM EDT - Metropolis is a software plaform that allows billions of images from live video to detect areas of concern

01:26AM EDT - >I assume that's the same as tracking people/vehicles across a city. How the city uses that is up to them

01:27AM EDT - RTX - rasterization with real-time ray tracing with AI prediction

01:27AM EDT - RTX is basically the future of gaming as well

01:27AM EDT - bringing in ray tracing 5-10 years earlier than expected

01:30AM EDT - Now doing a real-time demo

01:31AM EDT - >Everyone's phone is going off because Taiwan is doing an air raid drill

01:32AM EDT - Deep learning with ray tracing is the way forward

01:32AM EDT - This demo requires four volta GPUs

01:34AM EDT - Third phase is about AI to be able to come out of the computer into the world

01:34AM EDT - In order to do this, need three things: rich sensors, high perf/low power AI brain, smart actuators

01:35AM EDT - NVIDIA focuses on the brain

01:35AM EDT - enabling intelligent machiens

01:35AM EDT - We used to had to go out to get food. Now food comes to us

01:36AM EDT - Delivery, Industrial Drones, Agriculture, Pick-and-place, Logistics, Manufacturing

01:36AM EDT - Xavier, 9B transistors

01:37AM EDT - 8-core ARM CPU, 512 CUDA Cores

01:37AM EDT - Designed for ASIL-D

01:38AM EDT - New deep learning accelerator: DLA

01:38AM EDT - DLA is NVIDIA's version of the TPU

01:39AM EDT - Working on self-driving car

01:40AM EDT - Different versions of hardware for different levels of compute

01:40AM EDT - Drive Pegasus with dual Xavier and dual Volta

01:40AM EDT - (so not post-Volta?)

01:40AM EDT - Pegasus for driverless taxis

01:42AM EDT - Standard self-driving video time

01:44AM EDT - Announcing the Jetson Xavier Devkit $1299

01:45AM EDT - Computing platform

01:45AM EDT - 12nm FF

01:46AM EDT - Single largest processor project in NV history

01:46AM EDT - Production silicon is here

01:46AM EDT - Comes in small module

01:47AM EDT - Small dev kit

01:47AM EDT - 8 high-end ARM cores, stereo vision, 30W

01:48AM EDT - Jetson Xavier, early access in August

01:49AM EDT - On top of Jetson Xavier, have DL applications

01:50AM EDT - ISAAC IMX (Intelligent Machine Acceleration Applications)

01:50AM EDT - POSE estimation - infer the pose

01:50AM EDT - Gesture recognition

01:50AM EDT - Facial recognition and tracking

01:50AM EDT - Speech

01:51AM EDT - Speech recognition on device. Latency is key

01:51AM EDT - Eye tracking

01:51AM EDT - Hand Pose and finger skeletal tracking

01:52AM EDT - Environment depth

01:52AM EDT - DL to learn depth

01:52AM EDT - Visual Odometry

01:53AM EDT - Teaching robots in virtual reality in the server - test the hardware in the simulation

01:54AM EDT - Put the hardware and software in to the robot and it should just work

01:55AM EDT - ISAAC is the third phase of the AI revolution

01:56AM EDT - Apply intelligent machines to drive every industry

01:56AM EDT - Showing contruction and agriculture uses on video

01:56AM EDT - The two typical go-to demos

01:58AM EDT - Flying cameras/drones with AI

01:58AM EDT - NVIDIA's ' i am ai ' campaign

01:59AM EDT - Taiwan research into AI collaboration

01:59AM EDT - Focusing on manufacturing, healthcare, smart city and transportation

01:59AM EDT - 10-year collab

01:59AM EDT - work with the government and research institutions

01:59AM EDT - Building a supercomputing infrastructure

02:00AM EDT - Build a v.fast supercomputer

02:00AM EDT - self-driving car platforms

02:04AM EDT - Software written on HGX-2 can scale down to the Jetson Xavier

02:05AM EDT - First Gen Pegasus is Volta, Second Gen with Post-Volta coming

02:07AM EDT - Q: When is Volta coming to gaming? A: So many gamers were deprived of GeForces due to mining, but now pricing is coming down. 1080/Ti are the best cards right now, we suggest they buy GeForce ASAP

02:13AM EDT - Q: How long to AI accelerating ray tracing for games? Next gen or beyond? A: It's going to take time. Tackling film and enterprise/commercial first, then some day to mass market.

02:15AM EDT - Q: When can we run 4K 120 Hz on a single card. A: I don't know ... (!) I could predict, but I'm not going to

02:15AM EDT - Q: Mining only cards? A: We do these already to diffuse the demand for GeForce, Mining is a bonus to our business, but it is not our business

02:17AM EDT - Q: When is the next GeForce? A: I'll invite you. There will be lunch. But it's a long time.

02:20AM EDT - Q: Anything to say about NVIDIA's talk at Hot Chips about Next Gen changing to TBD? A: Live in the present! We will invite you to our launch events

02:22AM EDT - Q: Competitors combine CPU + GPU. What can NV do? A: Xavier is already CPU + GPU + other DSPs. Integration works great in certain markets. We also have DGX-2 when focus on GPUs, we have Xavier for unified platforms

02:29AM EDT - I think that's a wrap.