Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10225/the-nvidia-gtc-2016-live-blog
The NVIDIA GTC 2016 Keynote Live Blog
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2016 11:54 AM EST02:14PM EDT - Off to see more of the show
02:14PM EDT - And that's a wrap
02:13PM EDT - Recapping: SDKs, IRAY VR, Tesla P100, DGX-1, and autonomous cars
02:12PM EDT - Part of the 2016/2017 Formula E season
02:12PM EDT - Wil; be participating in the Roborace. All cars are PX2-powered
02:12PM EDT - Autonomous race car. 2200lbs
02:10PM EDT - Demonstrating DAVENET AI driivng software in action
02:10PM EDT - Cue "Knight Rider" theme
02:09PM EDT - It took BB8 some time to get halfway-decent at driving
02:08PM EDT - Roll video
02:08PM EDT - So we're going to see BB-8 learn to drive
02:08PM EDT - "Name of the car" even
02:08PM EDT - "We've been working on a project that is really fun. The name of the card is BB-8"
02:05PM EDT - PX2 in the car, DGX-1 in the cloud
02:05PM EDT - (Jen-Hsun is prepared for zoom photos this time)
02:04PM EDT - Drive PX2 uses two unannounced Pascal GPUs
02:04PM EDT - Drive PX2 in Jen-Hsun's hands
02:04PM EDT - Baidu, even
02:03PM EDT - Baisu is working on an NVIDIA-powered self-driving car computer as well
02:02PM EDT - Demoing DriveNet running at 180fps running on the smallest Drive PX
01:58PM EDT - Recapping Drive PX
01:57PM EDT - Up now: cars
01:57PM EDT - Deep learning everywhere
01:56PM EDT - Recap: Tesla M40 for hyperscale, K80 for multi-app HPC, P100 for scales very high, and DGX-1 for the early adopters
01:54PM EDT - First DGX-1s will be going to research universities
01:54PM EDT - NVIDIA is taking orders starting today
01:53PM EDT - DGX-1: $129,000
01:50PM EDT - NVIDIA has adapted TensorFlow for VGX-1
01:47PM EDT - Now on stage: Raja Monga of Google's TensorFlow team
01:47PM EDT - More AI/neural network examples coming up
01:41PM EDT - Baidu is using recurrent neural networks rather than convolutional
01:40PM EDT - Now on stage: Brian of Catanzaro of Baidu
01:38PM EDT - 1.33B images per day
01:38PM EDT - "We achieved a 12x speed-up year-over-year" in deep learning
01:37PM EDT - "Datacenter in a box"
01:37PM EDT - Discussing the challenges in scaling out the number of nodes in many algorithms
01:35PM EDT - Two Xeons, and 7TB in SSD capacity
01:35PM EDT - Quad Infiniband, Dual 10GBe
01:34PM EDT - 170TF FP16 in a box. 8 P100s in a hybrid cube mesh
01:34PM EDT - A full deep learning rackmount server
01:34PM EDT - NVIDIA DGX-1
01:33PM EDT - But if it's 600mm2 for just the die, that's a huge jump in the size of dies being produced on 16nm/14nm TSMC/Samsung FinFET
01:33PM EDT - Need to get confirmation on whether 600mm2 is just the GPU die, or if they're counting other parts as well
01:32PM EDT - "We'll ship it... soon"
01:32PM EDT - P100 servers coming in Q'17
01:31PM EDT - P100 in volume production today
01:30PM EDT - NV wanted new algorithms to take advantage of the hardware
01:29PM EDT - Recapping NVLink. 5x the aggregate speed of PCIe 3.0
01:29PM EDT - "TSMC CoWoS® (Chip-On-Wafer-On-Substrate) services use Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to integrate multiple chips into a single device. This architecture provides higher density interconnects, decreases global interconnect length, and lightens associated RC loading resulting in enhanced performance and reduced power consumption on a smaller form factor."
01:28PM EDT - Chip on Wafer on Substrate, the largest such chip ever made
01:28PM EDT - Er, 600mm^2 !!!!
01:27PM EDT - 500mm^2 !!!
01:27PM EDT - Jen-Hsun is "very frickin excited" about it
01:27PM EDT - Pre-emption
01:27PM EDT - Pascal, 16nm FinFET, Chip-On-Wafer-On-Substrate, NVLink, and New AI Algorithms
01:26PM EDT - The Tesla P100 is "5 miracles"
01:26PM EDT - (150B Transistors is undoubtedly counting the RAM, BTW)
01:26PM EDT - This is using the previously announced mezzanine connector with on-package memory
01:25PM EDT - (14MB is huge for a register file, BTW. That's a lot of very fast memory)
01:24PM EDT - 5.3TF FP64, 10.6TF FP32, 21.2TF FP16, 14MB SM Register File, 4MB L2 Cache
01:24PM EDT - 150B Transistors
01:23PM EDT - "The most ambitious project we have ever undertaken"
01:23PM EDT - Tesla P100
01:23PM EDT - writeln ('Hello, world.')
01:23PM EDT - Pascal time!
01:22PM EDT - AI needs more computing power than what is currently available
01:22PM EDT - "We simply don't have enough computing horsepower"
01:18PM EDT - Teaching AI to draw landscapes inspired by those images
01:18PM EDT - Training it with Romantic-era images
01:17PM EDT - Teaching a neural network to paint
01:17PM EDT - Demo time: Facebook AI Research
01:16PM EDT - Jen-Hsun wants to move from supervised, labor-intensive learning to unsupervised learning
01:14PM EDT - GIE: 20 images/s/W on the Tesla M4
01:14PM EDT - "There's no reason to use FPGAs. There's no reason to design dedicated chips"
01:13PM EDT - (Maxwell powered Tesla cards: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9776/nvidia-announces-tesla-m40-m4-server-cards-data-center-machine-learning )
01:13PM EDT - Recapping the Tesla M40 and M4
01:13PM EDT - Hyperscale is NVIDIA's fastest growing market
01:11PM EDT - Achieving super-human results without super-humans to program them
01:10PM EDT - Side note: bits of this remind me of the hard AI era of the 80s, when at one point true AI was thought to be right around the corner
01:10PM EDT - Talking about how increasingly broad companies are dipping their toes in AI and deep learning
01:08PM EDT - "Cloud platforms of the future are going to be powered by AI"
01:06PM EDT - Jen-Hsun is recapping areas where deep learning has ultimately come up with better algorithms than human-created programs
01:03PM EDT - "Deep learning is a big deal"
01:03PM EDT - "You've heard me talk about deep learning for for the last five years"
12:59PM EDT - Deep learning is key
12:57PM EDT - Microsoft ImageNet has been able to beat a human at image recognition
12:57PM EDT - This year will mark a major year in AI
12:55PM EDT - Up next: AI
12:54PM EDT - Not as capable as Iray VR, but it can handle a single photosphere
12:54PM EDT - Also announcing Iray VR Lite
12:53PM EDT - Jen-Hsun wants to get to the point where he can get out of his car at the office and it'll go park itself underground
12:51PM EDT - (This is on an HTC Vive, for anyone keeping track)
12:51PM EDT - Iray VR rendering of the inside of NVIDIA's new, under-construction headquarters
12:49PM EDT - Using probes to mark out fixed locations. Each probe takes 1 hour on an 8 GPU Quadro setup
12:48PM EDT - Raytracing render for VR applications
12:48PM EDT - Now announcing Iray VR
12:48PM EDT - The Mars demo was running on a Titan, but Jen-Hsun believes that's not enough. Need more performance to better physically simu;ate light
12:46PM EDT - Vendors have been pushing VR as an experience, and this is one such idea
12:45PM EDT - Geeks on Mars
12:44PM EDT - Woz is the first person to try Mars 2030 in VR
12:43PM EDT - Woz would seriously go if it were possible
12:42PM EDT - Jen-Hsun wants to make the Woz the first person on Mars
12:41PM EDT - Steve Wozniak has called in
12:40PM EDT - Demoing Mars 2030 live (though not in VR)
12:37PM EDT - Also in the VR tour, Mars 2030, an 8km^2 reconstruction of the surface of Mars
12:35PM EDT - Roll video
12:34PM EDT - Everest VR will be demoed at the show's VR area
12:33PM EDT - How will VR transform communications, design, and more?
12:32PM EDT - Video games are a very clear use of VR. But what about other fields?
12:31PM EDT - "A brand new computing platform"
12:31PM EDT - Up next: VR
12:30PM EDT - TX1 can process 24 images per second per Watt
12:29PM EDT - GIE is specifically for inference, as opposed to training on cuDNN
12:29PM EDT - NVIDIA wants to boost overall image processing throughput and energy efficiency
12:28PM EDT - New platform: GIE, the GPU Inference Engine
12:27PM EDT - Finally, Jetpack: The Jetson/Tegra X1 software ecosystem
12:27PM EDT - Close partners (JPL partners) have early access to the current testing builds
12:26PM EDT - General release in Q1'17
12:26PM EDT - DriveWorks: SensorFusion, computer vision/detection
12:25PM EDT - VRWorks: VR SLI, Context Priority, Multi-Res Shading
12:24PM EDT - CUDA 8 confirmed to support Pascal
12:23PM EDT - If CUDA 8 is due in June, it stands to reason we may be seeing Pascal around that time in some form
12:22PM EDT - CUDA 8 available in June
12:22PM EDT - ComputeWorks: cuDNN, nvGRAPH, IndeX
12:20PM EDT - DesignWorks: MDL libraries, Optix, etc
12:19PM EDT - Recapping the latest GameWorks features such as voxel accelerated ambient occlusion
12:18PM EDT - This seems to be a bundling of the various NVIDIA SDKs, including GameWorks, DriveWorks, and VRWorks
12:17PM EDT - First up: announcing the NVIDIA SDK
12:17PM EDT - Jen-Hsun will be talking about 5 things: toolbox, deep learning chip, deep learning software, VR, & more
12:15PM EDT - Over 300,000 registered CUDA developers
12:15PM EDT - This despite the fact that they now hold multiple GTCs over the globe
12:15PM EDT - GTC is getting bigger than ever. Twice as large as GTC 2012
12:13PM EDT - Discussing that they do all of this for "you", the audience, and its vast computing needs
12:12PM EDT - Jen-Hsun is now on stage
12:11PM EDT - Self-driving cars, Go, and more
12:11PM EDT - The video theme: AI
12:09PM EDT - Roll video
12:09PM EDT - Lights are dimming. It's showtime
12:07PM EDT - The keynote hall is at capacity, so it's a full house this morning
12:07PM EDT - Everyone is being asked to take their seat
12:05PM EDT - Meanwhile I haven't seen any sign of a car yet, but it would be typical for Jen-Hsun to work a car into his presentation somehow
12:04PM EDT - NVIDIA is indeed running a few minutes late; it sounds like we may start at 9:10 or so
12:04PM EDT - WiFi is being a bit finnicky, but hopefully we'll be okay
12:00PM EDT - Meanwhile someone behind me is discussing the weather. Yesterday it was in the 70s; by tomorrow it's in the 90s. The response from the person next to them: boy, those GPUs sure are hot!
11:59AM EDT - OpenPOWER partners will be holding a keynote tomorrow to discucss the latest advancements in that platform. For NVIDIA it's a big deal as OpenPOWER was previously setup to support NVLink between the CPU and GPUs
11:58AM EDT - On a side note: also taking place in San Jose at the convention center is the show-within-a-show OpenPOWER conference
11:57AM EDT - We may see some consumer news as well, but that's a big if at this point
11:57AM EDT - Some pro visualization (Quadro) news is also likely, given the heavy focus on VR here by the exhibitors
11:57AM EDT - At a minimum I expect Tesla/HPC news on this front, as this is what NVIDIA has focused on in the past, and the HPC market isn't as timing-sensitive
11:56AM EDT - The big news this year will of course be NVIDIA's Pascal architecture, which is scheduled to launch this year
11:56AM EDT - The keynote is scheduled to start at 9am PT, however I suspect we're going to be a few minutes late
11:53AM EDT - Kicking things off as always is the NVIDIA keynote, presented by CEO Jen-Hsun Huang
11:52AM EDT - We're here in sunny San Jose for the 2016 edition of NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC)