NVIDIA is planning an MCM-based architecture called Hopper and the full presentation has just leaked out. I couldn’t have my yearly cup of coffee with Jensen this year due to the coronavirus, but we had a meeting on Zoom and he agreed to share some high-resolution slides of NVIDIA’s upcoming plans. Not only do we have the details for the company’s next-generation H100 ‘Hopper’ GPU but he also shared creative plans that will attempt to stop miners once and for all.
NVIDIA H100 Hopper GPU: 43008 CUDA Cores Across 336 SMs Coupled To 48 GBs Of HBM4 Memory
The NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU will be the first GPU to cross the 100 billion transistors mark (it technically has 100.1 billion transistors). The GPU die shot shows 42 GPCs on each die (for 84 total), each housing 4 SMs with 128 CUDA cores each. This results in a massive grand total of 43008 CUDA cores. If NVIDIA can achieve even 1700 MHz on this beauty, it would result in a raw graphics horsepower of 146 TFLOPs! While Jensen did not show me a slide that would reveal how many tensor and RT cores this baby has, he did hint that the amount of Ray Tracing power on this GPU is enough to run a fully raytraced game in 1080p which can be expanded to 4k with DLSS X.
To put this into perspective, current implementations of gamers are based on shaders and polygons and aren’t truly raytraced (think Pixar CGI). Achieving playable performance on 1080p on an entirely raytraced scene would have been considered impossible just a few years ago but here we are. The two GPUs on the Hopper H100 are packaged using J-Stack technology which is NVIDIA’s proprietary stacking tech likely named after Jensen (Jensen’s stack?). It appears to be a multi-dimensional packaging approach that we have already seen in other GPUs and would allow the company to stack multiple dies with ease.
The card will use HBM4, which is far cheaper to fabricate and will actually lower the cost of memory for the end-customer even though there are 48GBs worth of memory on this thing. While we don’t know what pricing is like, we are hearing that the yield issue at Samsung has more or less finished and the cost of gamers (fps/$) will go down significantly with this generation.
Jensen has a foolproof way to fight miners with Geforce Pro Gamer program
Of course, none of this matters if gamers can’t actually buy the GPU so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that NVIDIA has a foolproof way of dealing with miners. They are partnering up with Steam and Epic Games store to enable in-store purchases of GPUs for verified and aged accounts. We are told that a large number of allocations will be made available through this program. This is actually brilliant because only allowing the GPU to be purchased in-store would eliminate most of the bots, scalping, and hacks. NVIDIA said initially they will require an aged account that is at least 2 years old and has had a minimum level of yearly activity to purchase these.
NVIDIA’s Hopper GPUs will be available at MSRP using in-store purchases on Steam and Epic Games.
This means that even if miners and scalpers created 100s of accounts and started aging right now, they would not be able to game the system for another 2 years (by which time the Samsung/TSMC supply bottleneck should be finished at any rate). EPIC store and Steam will also require additional account verification against a KYC form. The KYC form will verify the identity of the account holder using a national ID card (the contents of the process are heavily predicted) and you will only be able to hold one account per ID.
This is to ensure that people do not start selling aged accounts to scalpers or miners. As far as we can see, the KYC + in-store purchase should completely eliminate miners’ ability to scoop up GPUs in bulk and I am fairly certain most gamers would be willing to jump through the KYC hoops to get a GPU at MSRP. KYCs are also a standard affair in stock exchanges and other financial products. Of course, GPUs will still be available at extreme premiums on retailers like Amazon and eBay, and scalpers/miners are free to buy those at will. It is unclear why Xbox and Playstation stores weren’t included in the initial phase of the Geforce Pro Gamer’s program but sources tell us that Jensen was reportedly heard grumbling about “those damned console peasants to himself”.
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