Jensen Huang keynote at CES 2025 [video]
youtube.com152 points by subharmonicon 6 days ago
152 points by subharmonicon 6 days ago
I actually got a lot more upbeat about the potential of AI after watching this keynote more so than any other demonstration or presentation.
Blackwell is still based on N4, a derivative of 5nm. We know we will have N3 GPU next year, and they should be working with TSMC on capacity planning for N2. Currently Blackwell is pretty much limited by capacity of either TSMC, HBM or packaging. And unless the AI hype dies off soon ( which I doubt will happen ), we should still have at least another 5 years of these GPU improvements. We will have another 5 - 10x performance increase.
And they have foreshadowed their PC entry with MediaTek Partnership. ( I wonder why they dont just acquired Mediatek ) and may be even Smartphone or Tablet with Geforce GPU IP.
The future is exciting.
My guess is mediatek’s margins are much lower so an acquisition would tank Nvidia’s stock price by leading to lower returns. That and/or not wanting the distraction of operating mediatek’s many businesses that aren’t aligned to Nvidia core competence.
A major chip acquisition by Nvidia will probably never get global regulatory approval. I guess the question is what does Mediatek provide in the partnership. Nvidia is well versed in developing ARM SoCs already.
> what does Mediatek provide?
Market access, shares and relationship to all vendors, most of them never worked with Nvidia. Ready made 5G solutions. Know how in product category that is not as simple as buying IP and making a chip. Shipping Nvidia CUDA GPU IP to all other domains. For acquisition benefits they share the development cost of leading node and volume. Which is part of the wider SemiConductor industry strategy aka Broadcom.
But yes. I guess China would be the first one against it. I never quite understand why Two Company in country A and B would need Country C 's approval for them to merge or be acquired.
Country C's regulators can sanction the companies entities in C including denying access to the market in C. (C.f. how the US got Swiss banks to comply with financial transparency laws.)
It would not matter if C == Lichtenstein, but China is currently the world's biggest semi-conductor market ...
5g, wifi, bluetooth etc. what makes a mobile processor monile processor other than the CPU
yeah, those are just modules that anybody can just buy. NVIDIA already makes jetsons which are basically SBCs with decent GPU. so again, what does Mediatek provide?
What do you mean by modules, exactly? In a smartphone, which is the largest market, and where Mediatek is pretty strong, many of those functions are integrated as part of a system on chip. Power consumption also required good interplay between the various subsystems. So it's relatively tightly integrated. You also must have good Android drivers/BSP. And phone vendors are not that interested in changing vendors alle the time. There are also a bunch of patents that one must license, which Mediatek likely already does. Often cross licensing with what is typically competitors (like Qualcomm, maybe even Apple), which takes a bunch of time to set up.
looking back at the news releases: Mediatek seems to bring CPU design expertise on the table, which makes sense, they have much more experience and know-how in this than Nvidia. Mediatek is a top tier company with excellent engineering talent. Ideally Nvidia would acquire such a company so that they can challenge AMD and Qualcomm better but this doesn't seem to fit for their strategy to keep it small and focused. Hemce such a partnership works better for them.
Maybe a sign of NVIDIA divesting low-margin SoCs or finding a way to be in nextgen phone chips ? (Edit:) solidifying the cuda moat in phone SoCs too ?
I was taking these sort of improvements for granted. They'll certainly make ai cheaper, but most of the cost is up-front for generative models, and the models don't seem to be getting linearly better.
>I was taking these sort of improvements for granted.
A lot of people would think so. In reality had Smartphone ( iPhone ) not taken off. The PC market alone would not be able to sustain the cost of innovation and Moore's Law would have ended at 14nm and we would have to wait 3 to 4 years for every node. Smartphone along with all the adjacent work on Internet infrastructure scaled us to 3nm. I wrote about both of these in 2014 and was expecting some slow down by 3nm. Now AI will provide the Capex to scale us to 1nm and beyond.
How would shrinking the processor size help if the current GPU generation is already completely bottlenecked by VRAM bandwidth saturation?
We aren't seeing nearly the same gains on VRAM bandwidth as we are on compute bandwidth
The original idea behind shrinking the feature size is to make more money, by getting a greater nuber of chips from the same wafer.
Well, at least this generation almost doubles that bandwidth, right?
The flagship is an outlier there since it went from 384bit to 512bit memory. There was no such bus width increase for the rest of the stack so the gains are more modest, 4080 to 5080 is only a 34% improvement.
"only a 34% improvement" - listen to yourself, man.
It's amazing we still get significant improvements in every generation.
the solution is people will figure how to burn their models onto ASICs cheaply. apple model on iphone, google model on android, etc. This is tantalizing to businesses (1) you have YOUR company's model on lockdown as you see fit (2) iterations or improvements to the model mean you'll need to buy buy buy
The same industry opposition that killed the ARM acquisition would kill a mediatek acquisition.
The acquisition of ARM would have put Nvidia in the position of being able to impose to competitors uncompetitive restrictions on a quasi monopolistic market. Is it the case with MediaTek?
Mediatek is the largest smartphone SoC manufacturer, so yes. They're a supplier for Apple and the biggest competitor to Qualcomm, the two companies that were the most vocal in opposing the ARM acquisition.
Is GPU improvement is driven more by gaming then by AI hype? Gaming is the biggest industry and there is real money coming from that. Does speculative money from VCs actually overshadow actual money spent by consumers?
I know stock prices is driven by AI hype but how much does it actually effect the bottom line of Nvidia? I think GPU improvement happens regardless of AI.
https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/Q...
Datacenter revenue alone is ~10x of gaming. The datacenter revenue is thought to have literally ~100x the earnings all up (H100 and 4090 have similar transistor counts but the H100 sells for over $30k while the 4090 sells for $2k which indicates huge margins).
Gaming is pretty much insignificant for nvidia. That’s why nvidias stock has 10x’ed recently and their PE looks better now than it did 5 years ago despite that stock increase. They found a new market that dwarfs their old market.
NVIDIA’s net income grew ~580% year-on-year in their 2024 fiscal year. FY2025 is on track for 100%+ growth, essentially 14x in the last 2 years. This is not coming from gaming, “AI hype” is having a huge effect on NVIDIA’s bottom line.
Interpreting your question about "GPU improvement" from a product perspective, my read is that NVIDIA is of course targeting AI applications and the datacenter. To that end it just focuses on silicon that makes most sense for AI compute, and not so much for gaming.
Of course, the GPUs for the datacenter and for gaming are the same designs, so my read is that in gaming NVIDIA makes up for lack of actual performance for traditional rendering by pushing technologies that can utilize tensor cores like AI upscaling, frame prediction, ray tracing + denoising, etc.., that don't actually contribute to game graphics as much as they could have if they did an architecture tailored to gaming needs instead, with the technologies that they have. It's also sexier in theory to talk about exclusive AI-powered technologies proprietary to NVIDIA than just better performance.
"NVIDIA’s financial report reveals that its data center business revenue in FY2Q25 grew by 154% YoY, outpacing other segments and raising its contribution to total revenue to nearly 88%."
Gaming almost doesn't even register in Nvidias revenue anymore.
But I do think Jensen is smart enough to not drop gaming completely, he knows the AI hype might come and go and competitors might finally scrounge up some working SDKs for the other platforms.
ML was big before LLMs and nVidia was already making a killing from selling expensive GPUs that would never draw a single polygon ca 2015. They've been hobbling FP64 (double precision) support in cheaper "consumer" GPUs, to prevent their use in most data centers, for a long time too.
Looking into this a bit, it seems that nVidia was still making most of its money from "gaming" as recently as early 2022. I'd suspect that, if crypto mining could be separated out, the transition point actually happened a couple of years earlier, but nevertheless the datacenter segment didn't become dominant until about 2-2.5 years ago. It existed well before then, but wasn't that big.
There was something eerily epic about his assertions. To suggest that they are all of those companies is pretty wild.
AI is bewitching.
> I wonder why they dont just acquired Mediatek
It wouldn't be approved by country that Mediatek resides in. For the same reasons they won't approve a TSMC sale either.
The Nvidia Project Digits looked rather interesting. Much like a Apple studio ultra. 2 dies, "high" bandwidth unified memory, 20 cores, tiny mac mini sized case, and 2 SFP+ for 2 connectX ports (unsure if that's IB or ethernet).
Claim it will be quite good at AI (1 Tflop of fp4), but sadly don't mention the memory bandwidth. It's somewhere in the range of awesome to terrible depending on the bandwidth.
Am looking forward to hearing about this in the next few months. Apple has been super late in updating the macstudio, and even the old models are still super expensive, even used.
Related ongoing thread:
Ask HN: Pull the curtain back on Nvidia's CES keynote please - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42670808 - Jan 2025 (2 comments)
AMD barely mentioned their next-gen GPUs, NVIDIA came out swinging right from the start. AMD announced two new models which by their own cryptic slide wouldn't even compete with their current top-end. Then NVIDIA came and announced a 4090-performance GPU for $549...
If that's not just hot hair from NVIDIA, I totally get the business decision from AMD but man, would love some more competition in the higher end.
4090 (no frame generation) performance with a $549 card (4x frame generation), isn’t it?
In other words, the same performance at somewhere in the range of 2x-3.5x lighter workload. In other words, vastly different performance under same workload. It is veeery on the edge of false advertisement for them to omit the information in parentheses until later in the presentation. :)
That line should have been “4090 frame rates on budget hardware thanks to DLSS 4” or something like that.
From what I've read and heard, the 4090 was with single-frame generation.
Anyway, my point with those lines was to highlight just how defensive AMD was vs how offensive NVIDIA was.
It depends totally how you define "hot air" in this instance. Later in the keynote there's a mention how the $549 card achieves the 4090-like rendering performance with DLSS, i.e. not with raw graphics, number crunching horsepower.
Personally? It's a no for me dawg, DLSS unfortunately doesn't actually replace the need for the raw GPGPU crunch.
For the average layman and a consumer? Nvidia will be selling those GPU's like hotcakes.
I kind of agree with this. On the one hand when DLSS works well, it's amazing. I didn't notice any issues at all playing Senua's Sacrifice and Senua's Saga. They were both as good as playing on everything maxed without DLSS. On the other hand when using it on Jedi Survivor, it's a very janky experience. You can clearly see artifacts and it trying to "self-correct" when using DLSS vs without DLSS.
DLSS upscaling is good. On a 4k display I can't see any visual reason not to run the Balanced preset. DLSS frame gen on the other hand I'm much more skeptical of. Every time I've tried it something just feels off.
DLSS in cyberpunk has a lot of issues. Faces look weird, tons of ghosting, hair and particle effects looking very jagged.
They’re claiming DLSS4 (only available on their new cards) fixes a lot of these issues. But we’ll have to wait for the cards to get in the hands of reviewers before we’ll know for sure. I'm still pretty skeptical.
That said, if you read between the lines, it looks like the new 5090 is about ~40% faster than the 4090 at rasterisation. That’s a solid inter generational improvement.
Creating the frames with raw GPU is better because they are exactly what the game engine wants to render. But that's unbelievably expensive.
DLSS is absolutely the answer for gaming for the masses. DLSS will continue to improve and is far, far cheaper at creating intermediary frames than rendering them for real.
I buy my cards for AI first and gaming second, though. So DLSS is little use to me. 5090 is a bit of a weak improvement over the 4090 for me, but here we are.
> Then NVIDIA came and announced a 4090-performance GPU for $549
Never trust vendor performance claims (these specifically rely on 3x frame generation), and never assume cards will be available at MSRP.
Correct: "Debunking the CUDA Myth Towards GPU-Based AI Systems" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00210
AMD is not ready to have a full announcement for their new consumer GPUs: https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/where-was-rdna4-at-amds...
AMD has strategically decided to abandon the enthusiasts market [0]. Really sad that nvidia's monopoly has got solidified even further. That's one of the reasons I contribute to Apple's MLX instead of CUDA.
0: https://www.techradar.com/computing/gpu/amd-announces-new-ra...
Update: typical HN behavior. someone is downvoting all my comments one by one...
Someone with a lot of NVIDIA shares, no doubt…
>Update: typical HN behavior. someone is downvoting all my comments one by one...
You cant downvote older comments or comments older than 1 / 2 days.
As someone who has gone pretty deep in to robotics over the last 9 years I skipped right to the physical AI portion, and wasn't impressed.
This has been stated on HN in most robotics threads, but the core of what they show, once again, is content generation, a feature largely looking for an application. The main application discussed is training data synthesis. While there is value in this for very specific use cases it's still lipstick ("look it works! wow AI!") on a pig (ie. non-deterministic system being placed in a critical operations process). This embodies one of the most fallacious, generally unspoken assumptions in AI and robotics today - that it is desirable to deal with the real world in an unstructured manner using fuzzy, vendor-linked, unauditable, shifting sand AI building blocks. This assumption can make sense for driving and other relatively uncontrolled environments with immovable infrastructure and vast cultural, capital and paradigm investments demanding complex multi-sensor synthesis and rapid decision making based on environmental context based on prior training, but it makes very little sense for industrial, construction, agricultural, rural, etc. Industrial is traditionally all about understanding the problem or breaking it in to unit operations, design, fabricate and control the environment to optimize the process for each of those in sequence, and thus lowering the cost and increasing the throughput.
NVidia further wants us to believe we should buy three products from them: an embedded system ("nano"), a general purpose robotic system ("super") and something more computationally expensive for simulation-type applications ("ultra"). They claim (with apparently no need to proffer evidence whatsoever) that "all robotics" companies need these "three computers". I've got news for you: we don't, this is a fantasy, and limited if any value add will result from what amounts to yet another amorphous simulation, integration and modeling platform based on broken vendor assumptions. Ask anyone experienced in industrial, they'll agree. The industrial vendor space is somewhat broken and rife with all sorts of dodgy things that wouldn't fly in other sectors, but NVidia simply ain't gonna fix it with their current take, which for me lands somewhere between wishful thinking and downright duplicitous.
As for "digital twins", most industrial systems are much like software systems: emergent, cobbled together from multiple poor and broken individual implementations, sharing state across disparate models, each based on poorly or undocumented design assumptions. This means their view of self-state, or "digital twin", is usually functionally fallacious. Where "digital twins" can truly add value is in areas like functional safety, where if you design things correctly you avoid being mired in potentially lethally disastrous emergent states from interdependent subsystems that were not considered at subsystem design, maintenance or upgrade time because a non-exhaustive, insufficiently formal and deterministic approach was used in system design and specification. This very real value however hinges on the value being delivered at design time, before implementation, which means you're not going to be buying 10,000 NVidia chips, but most likely zero.
So my 2c is the Physical AI portion is basically a poorly founded forward-looking application sketch from what amounts to a professional salesman in a shiny black crocodile jacket at a purchased high-viz keynote. Perhaps the other segments had more weight.
I liked this part:
"one small step at a time, and one giant leap, together."
5090 for $2000, about $500 more than 4090 when it was announced.
Also nitpick: the opening video said tokens are responsible for all AI, but that only applies to a subset of AI models...
Market price for a 4090 is ~$2700 today: https://stockx.com/nvidia-founders-geforce-rtx-4090-24gb-gra...
When you have a retail price so far below "street" price, it just makes it harder to obtain and scalpers take a bigger cut. Raising the price to something more normal at least gives you more of a chance at the big-box store.
Or scalpers won’t be dissuaded and street price for a 5090 will be $3200 or more. $1500 was already an insane price tag for scalpers to pay but they did it anyways.
The scalpers are trying to arbitrage the difference in price between the prices bought directly from suppliers and those on the open secondary market. increasing the retail price doesn't increase the price on the secondary market, it just lowers the margin of scalpers.
very naiive question... But why have a retail price at all and not just auction off batches to retailers (say 10 000 card at a time)
Let the market set the price and only control how many cards you auction and when
Well for one thing it’s a lot easier to communicate expectations to consumers at CES.
“Coming soon to auction at a price set by users, no idea what that will be though, good luck!” is much less compelling for consumers trying to plan their purchases in advance.
Being able to decide a price and who you sell your product to is a huge leverage. Nvidia can go to a retailer selling something they don't like to be side by side on a shelf, hey ditch this and we will make you a price. It is never that overt of course and it can play geopolitically too, hey government you want chips? We have chips and it would be a shame if the market grabs them before you, BTW don't forget my tax cut.
It's 32GB, that was leaked well before the event.
> If Apple M4 Ultra gets close to 1.8 TB/s bandwidth of 5090
If past trends hold (Ultra = 2x Max) it'll be around 1.1 TB/s, so closer to the 4090.
It makes for a hard choice. M4 Ultra with say 128GB of RAM vs ... 2 x 5090 with 64GB of RAM for about the same price?
More tokens/sec on the dual 5090, but way bigger model on the M4.
Plus the dual 5090 might trip your breakers.
If anyone in this thread had watched the linked video or even read a summary, they ought to be at least talking about the DIGITS announcement.
128GB of VRAM for $3000.
Slow? Yes. It isn't meant to compete with the datacenter chips, it's just a way to stop the embarrassment of being beaten at HPC workstations by apple, but it does the job.
Jensen didn't talk about it. Maybe he knows it's embarrassingly low. Everyone knows nvidia won't give us more VRAM to avoid cannibalizing their enterprise products.
The official specs for the 5090 have been out for days on nvidia.com, and they explicitly state it's 32GB of GDDR7 with a 512-bit bus, for a total of 1.8TB/s of bandwidth.
32GB is still not a lot.
This feels like a weird complaint, given you started by saying it was 24GB, and then argued that the person who told you it was actually 32GB was making that up.
Looks like Nvidia did a simple calculation:
32GB (for 5090) / 24GB (for 4090) ≃ 1.33
$1500 × 1.33 ≃ $2000
I just think that for home AI use, 32GB isn't that helpful. In my experience and especially for agents, models at 32B parameters just start to be useful. Below that, they're useful only for simple tasks.
Yes, home / hobbyist LLM users are not overly excited about this, but
a) they are never going to be happy,
b) it's actually a significant step up given the bulk are dual-card users anyway, so this bumps them from (at the high end of the consumer segment) 48GB to 64GB of VRAM, which _is_ pretty significant given the prevalence of larger models / quants in that space, and
c) vendors really don't care terribly much about the home / hobbyist LLM market, no matter how much people in that market wish otherwise.
For what 5090 is offering with 32GB RAM I thought it is a pretty decent price comparatively to 4090. I thought the whole lineup is really well priced.
edit: 32GB is confirmed here https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-serie...
Supposedly, this image of a Inno3D 5090 box leaked, revealing 32GB of VRAM. It seems like the 5090 will be more of a true halo product, given the pricing of the other cards.
https://www.techpowerup.com/330538/first-nvidia-geforce-rtx-...
[flagged]
I'm not sure what you mean by that? Jensen seemed quite normal in his presentation. Some of the prerecorded video was a bit iffy - "this is how intelligence is made" totally ignoring natural intelligence. Coked up behaviour is more like Will Smith punching Chris Rock.
I thought the synthetic data generation for self driving was interesting https://youtu.be/k82RwXqZHY8?t=4369 I could have used something like that myself for learning flying.
Not sure about that, but resentfulness, arrogance and hubris are more present than ever on HN.
[flagged]
He tried so much to look funny but it didn't look good on him. And at one point he said 4090 is like taking home an equivalent of a $10,000 PC, and he expected the crowd to clap, but no one, literally no one, clapped. Because everyone knows GeForce prices have been monopoly prices for years and 4090 is intentionally crippled by nvidia drivers to be less capable than it really is (see George Hotz in-depth analysis).
To me it seemed like he tried to justify its price as if it were a small part of a $10k setup with lots of RGB lighting but for some reason mainly for watching movies. No one has one just for watching movies, and it's likely more than the rest of the gaming PC build combined. Monitor possibly included.
Someone should tell Mr. Huang that it's not 20 years ago and that their products now cost 2x the amount of all other components in that "pc entertainment system control center" combined. He seems to not know, out-of-touch billionaire as he is.
Haha. So true. I am writing a program to draw facial geometry and similarity between him and Jackie Chan is too good to be true.
Jensen has noticed also https://www.pcgamer.com/jensen-huang-thinks-jackie-chan-woul...