54 pointsby TSiege20 hours ago10 comments
  • mk_stjames18 hours ago
    Whenever I see press on these new 'rack scale' systems, the first thing I think is something along the lines of: "man I hope the BIOS and OS's and whatnot supporting these racks are relatively robust and documented/open sourced enough so that 40 years from now when you can buy an entire rack system for $500, some kid in a garage will be able to boot and run code on these".
    • criemen17 hours ago
      What's the power hookup to just boot one rack? I'd imagine that's more than you get anywhere in residential areas for a single house.
      • embedding-shape17 hours ago
        Hopefully in 40 years we'll all be running miniature cold fusion power or something, so we can avoid burning the planet to the ground.
      • MisterTea16 hours ago
        Depends on the residence. I have personally seen a large house in Brooklyn with dual 200 amp 120/208 volt three phase services (two meters, each feeding a panel.) I have seen someone setup an old SGI rack scale Origin 3000 systems in their garage. I think they even had an electrician upgrade their service to accommodate it.
      • wmf16 hours ago
        170 kW
        • pureagave14 hours ago
          100% this. But don't forget the garden hose running full blast so you can cool it! It's not impossible to get up and running for fun for an hour, but this isn't a run 24/7 kinda setup any more than getting an old mainframe running in one's garage is practical.
    • wmf18 hours ago
      The firmware is UEFI and Vera should have good upstream support. The GPU driver is proprietary though, so you'll have to dig up the last supported version from 2036.
      • 17 hours ago
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  • wmf18 hours ago
    The blog post has more technical details and fewer quotes from customers: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-the-nvidia-rubin-pl...
    • mrandish15 hours ago
      That link was somewhat clearer, thanks.

      As a software guy who follows chip evolution more at a macro level like: new design + process node enabling better cores/tiles/units/clocks + new architecture enabling better caches, busses, I/O == better IPC, bandwidth, latency and throughput at given budget (cost, watts, heat, space) - I've yet to find anything which gives a sense of Rubin's likely lift vs the prior generation that's grounded in macro-but-concrete specs (such as cores, tiles, units, clocks, caches, busses, IPC, bandwidth, latency, throughput).

      Edit: I found something a bit closer after scrolling down on a sub-link from the page you linked (https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-the-nvidia-rubin-pl...).

      • alecco15 hours ago
        For dev info we'll need to wait for GTC 2026 March 16–19. CES is just hype.
      • wmf15 hours ago
        They're intentionally drip-feeding information over time until the actual release.
  • codyb18 hours ago
    If their new platform reduces inference token cost by 10x, does that play well or not well with the recently updated GPU deprecation schedules companies have been playing with to reduce projected cost outlays?

    For context, my understanding is that companies have recently moved to mark their expected GPU deprecation cycles from 3 years to as high as 6 which has huge impacts on projected expenditures.

    I wonder what the step was for the Blackwell platform from the previous. Is this slower which might indicate that the slower deprecation cycle is warranted, or faster?

    • drexlspivey17 hours ago
      No way you throw away Blackwell GPUs after just 3 years. Google runs 8 year old TPUs still at 100% utilization. Why would you depreciate them in just 3 years?
      • ryanmcgarvey16 hours ago
        The conversation around GPU lifecycles seems to be conflating the various shear rates within the data center. My layman understanding is that the old 3 year replacement cycle had more to do with some component, not necessarily the memory or the processor, going wrong for half of their units by 3 years, at which point GPUs were cheap enough and advancing faster enough that it was more cost effective to upgrade than to fix. However, that calculus changes completely when the GPU and the HBM are orders of magnitude more expensive than the rest of the system. I suspect that we will see repairs being done on on the various brittle bits of the system and the actual core expensive components will continue to operate much longer than 3 years.
    • UltraSane18 hours ago
      Companies are playing games with GPU depreciation.
      • causal17 hours ago
        Unsure why you were downvoted; I'm curious to understand this comment. Playing finance and accounting games I presume you mean.
        • UltraSane14 hours ago
          Yes they are depreciating GPUs for longer than usual time periods like 6 years.
    • m3kw918 hours ago
      but token required for quality generation may increase as much very soon.
      • codyb18 hours ago
        Yea, definitely a good point. Going to be interesting to see how it plays out. I definitely do not have the expertise to answer the question
  • TSiege20 hours ago
    Extreme Codesign Across NVIDIA Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 Switch, ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, BlueField-4 DPU and Spectrum-6 Ethernet Switch Slashes Training Time and Inference Token Generation Cost

    Technical details available here https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-the-nvidia-rubin-pl...

  • Animats18 hours ago
    Their own CPU, too - 88 ARM cores.

    So it's an all-NVidia solution - CPU, interconnects, AI GPUs.

    • tibbydudeza16 hours ago
      Afaik MediaTek helped them with the CPU part.
  • Groxx19 hours ago
    ... it took a couple searches to figure out that "extreme codesign" wasn't actually code-signing, but "co-design" like "stuff that was designed to work together"
    • utopiah19 hours ago
      Even << "co-design" like "stuff that was designed to work together" >> sound strange to me. Typically when I read about co-design is stuff that was designed together, by more than 1 party.
    • pyuser58319 hours ago
      Me too. Good style says to avoid creating words with dashes - it’s Un-American. But clarity matters more than rules.
      • gilrain19 hours ago
        Is there any American style guide that insists hyphens be avoided even when a closed compound would cause ambiguity? I follow Chicago, but I imagine other style guides also already emphasise clarity.
      • mortehu19 hours ago
        Wouldn't "code sign" be two words in English? And "code signing" rather than "code sign"?
        • Groxx17 hours ago
          Mostly yes, and I prefer it that way, but it does get smashed into a single word sometimes. "co-design" I've mostly only seen hyphenated, though I don't see it often enough or in broad enough contexts to really claim anything about the frequency in a general sense.

          Maybe it's caused by `codesign` tools? Like `codesign --extreme` which probably requires two signers to sign one thing?

        • 17 hours ago
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    • alfalfasprout19 hours ago
      same I was so confused
  • exacube18 hours ago
    does anyone know how well this 5x petaflop improvement translates to real world performance?

    I know that memory bandwidth tends to be a big limiting factor, but I'm trying to understand how this factors into it its overall perf, compared to blackwell.

  • 2OEH8eoCRo018 hours ago
    Rebuild all the data centers!
    • metalliqaz18 hours ago
      lol haven't even started building half the Blackwell datacenters yet
  • metalliqaz19 hours ago
    Elon's emoji-filled blurb for that press release is the most cringe things I've seen this week.
    • cinntaile19 hours ago
      I find all the blurbs weird, do they usually include that? If not, why now? It doesn't look professional.
      • bredren19 hours ago
        I think it is interesting. Is there any other company in a position today that could put together endorsement quotes from such high ranking people across tech?

        Also: Tim Cook / Apple is noticeably absent.

        • utopiah19 hours ago
          That's because of financial links. They are so intertwined propping up the same bubble they are absolutely going to share quotes instantly. FWIW just skimmed through and the TL;DR sounds to me like "Look at the cool kid, we play together, we are cool too!" without obviously any information, anything meaningful or insightful, just boring marketing BS>
          • mrandish16 hours ago
            > They are so intertwined propping up the same bubble they are absolutely going to share quotes instantly.

            Reading this line, I had a funny image form of some NVidia PR newbie reflexively reaching out to Lisa Su for a supporting quote and Lisa actually considering it for a few seconds. The AI bubble really has reached a level of "We must all hang together or we'll surely hang separately".

        • XorNot18 hours ago
          Why is that interesting?
          • bredren16 hours ago
            It could be an indicator that Apple is not as leveraged up on NVIDIA as to provide a quote. Cook did make a special one of a kind product for the current POTUS, so he is nothing if not pragmatic.
      • saaaaaam18 hours ago
        Quotes from known names in a boring corporate press release are absolutely standard. It gives journalists a hook to build a story. “Elon Musk says new Nvidia tech is…”
      • dataking17 hours ago
        Because standing out gets attention?
    • saaaaaam18 hours ago
      I wonder what the significance of a green heart is, in Elon-world.
    • 19 hours ago
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  • dannersy19 hours ago
    Riveting.