SAN JOSE, the United States, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Nvidia launched Volta, it's seventh-generation GPU architecture that delivers 5x the performance of its predecessor, this week at the annual GPU Technology Conference, which attracted a record of more than 7,000 scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and global press.
"Volta is definitely a game changer, especially in deep learning, but also for general parallel computing work with," Will Ramey, Nvidia director of developer programs, told Xinhua on Thursday at the eighth annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California.
"It has a new tenser core inside of it to help it accelerate deep learning applications across a wide range of scientific domains and industry segments," Ramey said.
According to the company, the new GPU architecture is built with 21 billion transistors and delivers the equivalent performance of 100 CPUs for deep learning. It provides a 5x improvement over Pascal, the current-generation NVIDIA GPU architecture, in peak teraflops, and 15x over the Maxwell architecture, launched two years ago. This performance surpasses by 4x the improvements that Moore's law would have predicted.
"When we introduce a new GPU architecture, like Volta, it becomes available across our entire product line," Ramey said.
Over the two hours' GTC keynote on Wednesday, Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, introduced a lineup of new Volta-based AI supercomputers including a powerful new version of DGX-1 deep learning appliance. Huang also announced the Isaac robot-training simulator and unveiled the NVIDIA GPU Cloud platform and a partnership with Toyota to help build a new generation of autonomous vehicles.
The company also announced its first Volta-based processor, the NVIDIA Tesla V100 data center GPU, which brings "extraordinary speed and scalability for AI inferencing and training, as well as for accelerating HPC and graphics workloads".
"Artificial intelligence is driving the greatest technology advances in human history," said Huang, "It will automate intelligence and spur a wave of social progress unmatched since the industrial revolution."
