Being a company that certainly knows how to attract attention to itself and its products, Nvidia issued a blog post that unambiguously hints at its plan to introduce its next-generation compute GPU architecture codenamed Hopper. The company’s blog post is titled ‘Hopped Up,’ and it announces Jensen Huang’s keynote at the GTC conference that will take place on Tuesday, March 22, 2022.
“Each GTC, Huang introduces powerful new ways to accelerate computing of all kinds, and tells a story that puts the latest advances in perspective,” the blog post reads. “Expect Huang to introduce new technologies, products and collaborations with some of the world’s leading companies.”
Nvidia’s Hopper will presumably be the company’s first multi-die compute GPU made using TSMC’s N5 (5nm) fabrication technology. With its compute-oriented Ampere GPUs, Nvidia put a lot of emphasis on AI/DL/ML workloads and appropriate data formats. These GPUs offered formidable performance in traditional HPC workloads (which require FP64 precision); their key advantages lay in the field of emerging workloads. We do not know the critical feature of Hopper at this point, but we will undoubtedly learn more about it next week.
Unfortunately, the description of the event does not reveal any precise details about Hopper. This year’s GTC will focus on “accelerated computing, deep learning, data science, digital twins, networking, quantum computing and computing in the data center, cloud and edge.”
Even before its formal introduction, Nvidia’s Hopper architecture has won at least one supercomputer contract. In late 2021, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced its new supercomputer called Kestrel that will leverage what Nvidia calls ‘A100Next Tensor Core compute GPU.’ The machine will come online in 2023 and will provide the performance of approximately 44 FP64 PetaFLOPS, which is in line with what the No. 7 most powerful supercomputer in the world offers today.
