Nvidia Corp revealed new flagship chips for video gamers on Tuesday that use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve graphics, saying the processors are being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Nvidia has risen to prominence in recent years because to its thriving data center business, which sells processors used in artificial intelligence tasks such as natural language processing. However, the company’s roots lie in graphics chips, which accounted for 59% of its $26.9 billion in revenue in the previous fiscal year.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang announced the company’s newest “Ada Lovelace” series of graphics chips in a live webcast keynote talk on Tuesday, named after the 19th-century British mathematician acknowledged as an early pioneer in computer science.
The chip’s flagship GeForce RTX 4090 variant will cost $1,599 and will be available on October 12. Two less expensive RTX 4080 variants will be available in November for $899 and $1,199, respectively.
Nvidia designs its chips, but partners produce them. The chips, according to Huang, will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) using its “4N” chip manufacturing process, a departure from Nvidia’s previous generation of flagship gaming chips, which were manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
AI is used in the new Lovelace processors to boost video game graphics. Because calculating the appearance of each pixel on the screen is difficult, Nvidia processors employ AI to forecast how some pixels should appear without performing the whole set of computations. The Lovelace chips have enhanced that concept by employing AI to generate full frames of a game.
In a press conference, Matt Wuebbling, vice president of worldwide GeForce marketing at Nvidia, stated that the Lovelace chips will be available globally and will not be affected by a newly imposed US restriction on selling Nvidia’s top data center AI chips to China.
Wuebbling also stated that the chips will not include a so-called hash-rate restriction, which Nvidia included in its previous generation of chips to limit their use in mining the cryptocurrency Ethereum due to recent changes in how that currency is monitored.
