Intel's 110,000,000,000,000 Problem
Nvidia has launched a new desktop GPU that is designed to bring massive amount of power to people who are working on machine learning applications. The new Titan V card will provide customers with Nvidia Volta chip that can plug into a desktop computer.
Nvidia is a big problem for Intel right now. Despite the fusion of Intel and AMD to fight Nvidia, it seems that Nvidia keeps pushing the envelope. The new Titan V with capacity to drop 110 teraflops (110 trillion operations per second) of computing capacity (i.e. 110,000,000,000,000) is certainly a new level of competition. If Intel does not solve Nvidia within the next five years, Intel may become an also-ran company.
According to a press release, the Titan V promises increased performance over its predecessor, the Pascal-based Titan X, while maintaining the same power requirements. The Titan V sports 110 teraflops of raw computing capability, which is 9X that of its predecessor.
It’s a chip that’s meant for machine learning researchers, developers, and data scientists who want to be able to build and test machine learning systems on desktop computers. GPUs are good at executing the types of calculations needed to train a machine learning system, and Nvidia’s Volta architecture is designed to provide further performance boosts for those tasks.
Simply, Nvidia is commoditizing a business which Intel and others still think is a premium one. By bringing Titan V to the desktop, it will make it make possible within a generation (three years in the industry) to convince desktop computer manufacturers to forget Intel chips and use Titan V instead. In other words, Titan V will not be an add-on, but rather the power-brain of the machines. If Intel loses the PC market, it will have a real problem.
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If Nvidia takes the PC market, the server business will also go. It is bringing the price down, to a manageable level, even at 9X improvement in capacity.
This is the most powerful PC GPU ever created, and it is not coming from Intel. That should be a big concern to Intel because Qualcomm and others are holding tight on mobile devices. If Intel loses desktop, the game may be over. Nvidia is ahead in driverless cars because AI is the heart of the computing in driverless car sector.
Nvidia CEO was named Fortune Magazine Businessperson of the year, 2017. He is certainly on the driver's seat right now.
