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Blackwell (microarchitecture)

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Blackwell
LaunchingQ4 2024
Designed byNvidia
Manufactured by
Fabrication processTSMC 4NP
Codename(s)GB100
GB20x
Specifications
Memory supportGDDR7 (Consumer)
HBM3e (Datacenter)
PCIe supportPCIe 5.0 (Consumer)
PCIe 6.0 (Datacenter)
Supported Graphics APIs
DirectXDirectX 12 Ultimate (Feature Level 12_2)
Direct3DDirect3D 12
Shader ModelShader Model 6.8
OpenCLOpenCL 3.0
OpenGLOpenGL 4.6
VulkanVulkan 1.3
Supported Compute APIs
CUDACompute Capability 10.x
DirectComputeYes
Media Engine
Encoder(s) supportedNVENC
History
PredecessorAda Lovelace (consumer)
Hopper (datacenter)
SuccessorRubin

Blackwell is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Hopper and Ada Lovelace microarchitectures.

Named after statistician and mathematician David Blackwell, the name of the Blackwell architecture was leaked in 2022 with the B40 and B100 accelerators being confirmed in October 2023 with an official Nvidia roadmap shown during an investors presentation.[1] It was officially announced at Nvidia's GTC 2024 keynote on March 18, 2024.[2]

History

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David Blackwell (1919–2010)

In March 2022, Nvidia announced Hopper datacenter architecture for AI accelerators. Demand for Hopper products was high throughout 2023's AI hype.[3] The lead time from order to delivery of H100-based servers was between 36 and 52 weeks due to shortages and high demand.[4] Nvidia reportedly sold 500,000 Hopper-based H100 accelerators in Q3 2023 alone.[4] Nvidia's AI dominance with Hopper products led to the company increasing its market capitalization to over $2 trillion, behind only Microsoft and Apple.[5]

The Blackwell architecture is named after American mathematician David Blackwell who was known for his contributions to the mathematical fields of game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. These areas have influenced or are implemented in transformer-based generative AI model designs or their training algorithms. Blackwell was the first African American scholar to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.[6]

In Nvidia's October 2023 Investor Presentation, its datacenter roadmap was updated to include reference to its B100 and B40 accelerators and the Blackwell architecture.[7][8] Previously, the successor to Hopper was simply named on roadmaps as "Hopper-Next". Nvidia's updated roadmap emphasized the move from a two-year release cadence for datacenter products to yearly releases targeted for x86 and ARM systems.

At the Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) on March 18, 2024, Nvidia officially announced the Blackwell architecture with focus placed on its B100 and B200 datacenter accelerators and associated products, such as the eight-GPU HGX B200 board and the 72-GPU NVL72 rack-scale system.[9] Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that with Blackwell, "we created a processor for the generative AI era" and emphasized the overall Blackwell platform combining Blackwell accelerators with Nvidia's ARM-based Grace CPU.[10][11] Nvidia touted endorsements of Blackwell from the CEOs of Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle.[11] The keynote did not mention gaming.

It was reported in October 2024 that there was a design flaw in the Blackwell architecture that had been fixed in collaboration with TSMC.[12] According to Huang, the design flaw was "functional" and "caused the yield[s] to be low".[13] By November 2024, Morgan Stanley was reporting that "the entire 2025 production" of Blackwell silicon was "already sold out".[14]

Architecture

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Blackwell is an architecture designed for both datacenter compute applications and for gaming and workstation applications with dedicated dies for each purpose.

Process node

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Blackwell is fabricated on the custom 4NP node from TSMC. 4NP is an enhancement of the 4N node used for the Hopper and Ada Lovelace architectures. The Nvidia-specific 4NP process likely adds metal layers to the standard TSMC N4P technology.[15] The GB100 die contains 104 billion transistors, a 30% increase over the 80 billion transistors in the previous generation Hopper GH100 die.[16] As Blackwell cannot reap the benefits that come with a major process node advancement, it must achieve power efficiency and performance gains through underlying architectural changes.[17]

The GB100 die is at the reticle limit of semiconductor fabrication.[18] The reticle limit in semiconductor fabrication is the maximum size of features that lithography machines can etch into a silicon die. Previously, Nvidia had nearly hit TSMC's reticle limit with GH100's 814 mm2 die. In order to not be constrained by die size, Nvidia's B100 accelerator utilizes two GB100 dies in a single package, connected with a 10 TB/s link that Nvidia calls the NV-High Bandwidth Interface (NV-HBI). NV-HBI is based on the NVLink 5.0 protocol. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed in an interview with CNBC that Nvidia had spent around $10 billion in research and development for Blackwell's NV-HBI die interconnect. Veteran semiconductor engineer Jim Keller, who had worked on AMD's K7, K12 and Zen architectures, criticized this figure and claimed that the same outcome could be achieved for $1 billion through using Ultra Ethernet rather than the proprietary NVLink system.[19] The two connected GB100 dies are able to act like a large monolithic piece of silicon with full cache coherency between both dies.[20] The dual die package totals 208 billion transistors.[18] Those two GB100 dies are placed on top of a silicon interposer produced using TSMC's CoWoS-L 2.5D packaging technique.[21]

Streaming multiprocessor

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CUDA cores

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CUDA Compute Capability 10.0 is added with Blackwell.

Tensor cores

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The Blackwell architecture introduces fifth-generation Tensor Cores for AI compute and performing floating-point calculations. In the data center, Blackwell adds support for FP4 and FP6 data types.[22] The previous Hopper architecture introduced the Transformer Engine, software to facilitate quantization of higher-precision models (e.g., FP32) to lower precision, for which Hopper has greater throughput. Blackwell's second generation Transformer Engine adds support for the newer, less-precise FP4 and FP6 types. Using 4-bit data allows greater efficiency and throughput for model inference during generative AI training.[17] Nvidia claims 20 petaflops (excluding the 2x gain the company claims for sparsity) of FP4 compute for the dual-GPU GB200 superchip.[23]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Nvidia Corporation - Nvidia Investor Presentation October 2023". Nvidia. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
  2. ^ "Nvidia Blackwell Platform Arrives to Power a New Era of Computing". Nvidia Newsroom. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
  3. ^ Szewczyk, Chris (August 18, 2023). "The AI hype means Nvidia is making shiploads of cash". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  4. ^ a b Shilov, Anton (November 28, 2023). "Nvidia sold half a million H100 AI GPUs in Q3 thanks to Meta, Facebook — lead times stretch up to 52 weeks: Report". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  5. ^ King, Ian (March 19, 2024). "Nvidia Looks to Extend AI Dominance With New Blackwell Chips". Yahoo! Finance. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  6. ^ Lee, Jane Lanhee (March 19, 2024). "Why Nvidia's New Blackwell Chip Is Key to the Next Stage of AI". Bloomberg. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  7. ^ "Investor Presentation" (PDF). Nvidia. October 2023. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  8. ^ Garreffa, Anthony (October 10, 2023). "Nvidia's next-gen GB200 'Blackwell' GPU listed on its 2024 data center roadmap". TweakTown. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  9. ^ "Nvidia GB200 NVL72". Nvidia. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
  10. ^ Leswing, Kif (March 18, 2024). "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: 'We need bigger GPUs'". CNBC. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  11. ^ a b Caulfield, Brian (March 18, 2024). "'We Created a Processor for the Generative AI Era,' Nvidia CEO Says". Nvidia. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  12. ^ Gronholt-Pedersen, Jacob; Mukherjee, Supantha (October 23, 2024). "Nvidia's design flaw with Blackwell AI chips now fixed, CEO says". Reuters. Retrieved December 17, 2024.
  13. ^ Shilov, Anton (October 23, 2024). "Nvidia's Jensen Huang admits AI chip design flaw was '100% Nvidia's fault' — TSMC not to blame, now-fixed Blackwell chips are in production". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved December 17, 2024.
  14. ^ Kahn, Jeremy (November 12, 2024). "60 direct reports, but no 1-on-1 meetings: How an unconventional leadership style helped Jensen Huang of Nvidia become one of the most powerful people in business". Fortune. Retrieved November 16, 2024.
  15. ^ Byrne, Joseph (March 28, 2024). "Monster Nvidia Blackwell GPU Promises 30× Speedup, but Expect 3×". XPU.pub. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
  16. ^ Smith, Ryan (March 18, 2024). "Nvidia Blackwell Architecture and B200/B100 Accelerators Announced: Going Bigger With Smaller Data". AnandTech. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  17. ^ a b Prickett Morgan, Timothy (March 18, 2024). "With Blackwell GPUs, AI Gets Cheaper and Easier, Competing with Nvidia Gets Harder". The Next Platform. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  18. ^ a b "Nvidia Blackwell Platform Arrives to Power a New Era of Computing". Nvidia Newsroom. March 18, 2024. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  19. ^ Garreffa, Anthony (April 14, 2024). "Jim Keller laughs at $10B R&D cost for Nvidia Blackwell, should've used ethernet for $1B". TweakTown. Retrieved April 16, 2024.
  20. ^ Hagedoom, Hilbert (March 18, 2024). "Nvidia B200 and GB200 AI GPUs Technical Overview: Unveiled at GTC 2024". Guru3D. Retrieved April 7, 2024.
  21. ^ "Nvidia Blackwell "B100" to feature 2 dies and 192GB of HBM3e memory, B200 with 288GB". VideoCardz. March 17, 2024. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  22. ^ Edwards, Benj (March 18, 2024). "Nvidia unveils Blackwell B200, the "world's most powerful chip" designed for AI". Ars Technica. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
  23. ^ "Nvidia GB200 NVL72". Nvidia. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
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