A new report from Taiwan sheds some light on Nvidia's launch plans for its upcoming Blackwell architecture. The company first revealed the hardware back in March but was light on details on when it might arrive and in what configurations. This new report adds several details regarding Nvidia's launch plans, including that the flagship configuration will be a 72-chip cabinet that will reportedly sell for a whopping $3 million.
The new report comes from Taiwan Economic Daily, and it outlines Nvidia's strategy to continue its dominance of the AI market with Blackwell. The site reports Nvidia will begin production of Blackwell in the second half of 2024 and enter the market in earnest in 2025 with the goal of shipping 40,000 units by next year, which seems low to us. However, Nvidia's volumes might be lower for Blackwell compared to Hopper, as it's no longer selling individual chips but entire systems instead. According to Wccftech, Nvidia will offer three Blackwell configurations: NVL72, NVL36, and HGX B200.
The NVL72 is the flagship offering for Blackwell (top), and it comes as a liquid-cooled cabinet with 36 dual-GPU Grace Blackwell "superchips," for a total of 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs. Each GPU is connected via a 10TB/s interconnect to allow them to function as a single GPU, and is then connected to the Grace CPU with a 1.8TB/s link as well. Nvidia says NVL72 will offer 30x the performance of the same number of H100 GPUs while using 25x less energy. The NVL36 will offer roughly half the hardware of its big brother, the NVL72, with 36 GPUs and 18 CPUs.
The GBX 200 seems to be the baseline configuration, as Nvidia says it's a server board with eight B200 GPUs connected via NVLink. It also supports networking speeds up to 400Gb/s with its Quantum-2 InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking technologies. Foxconn and Quanta are reportedly manufacturing the cabinets and boards for Nvidia, with TSMC making the silicon. The partnerships are expected to provide a major windfall for all involved, as demand for Blackwell will likely exceed supply for quite some time, if past is precedent.