Using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve graphics, Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) on Tuesday unveiled new flagship chips for video gamers. The company said it has partnered with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) to produce the processors.
With its thriving data center business, which sells chips used in artificial intelligence tasks like natural language processing, Nvidia has attracted attention recently. Although the company’s roots are in graphics chips, those products still accounted for 59% of its most recent fiscal year’s $26.9 billion in revenue.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Tuesday unveiled the firm’s newest “Ada Lovelace” series of graphics chips, named for the 19th-century British mathematician regarded as an early pioneer in computer science. The keynote speech was streamed online.
The most expensive version of the chip, the GeForce RTX 4090, will cost $1,599 and go on sale on October 12. Two RTX 4080 models with lower starting prices will be available in November for $899 and $1,199, respectively.
Although Nvidia designs its chips, partners manufacture them. Huang revealed that the “4N” chip manufacturing technology used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) will be used to produce the chips, a departure from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd., which produced Nvidia’s previous generation of flagship gaming chips.
AI is used in the new Lovelace chips to enhance video game graphics. Because it is difficult to calculate what each pixel on the screen should look like, Nvidia chips use AI to predict the appearance of some pixels without performing the full set of computations. A game’s entire frame can now be generated using AI thanks to the Lovelace chips.
The recent U.S. ban on selling Nvidia’s top data center AI chips to China will not apply to the Lovelace chips, according to Matt Wuebbling, vice president of global GeForce marketing at Nvidia, who made the announcement during a press briefing.
Wuebbling added that due to recent modifications in the way Ethereum is tracked, the chips will not come equipped with a so-called hash-rate limiter, a feature Nvidia incorporated in its previous generation of chips to restrict their use in cryptocurrency mining.
