Nvidia announced chips for video gamers that use artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance graphics. Nvidia has also selected Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) to make the processors.
Nvidia has gained attention in recent years with its booming data center business, which sells chips used in artificial intelligence work such as natural language processing. Nvidia’s graphics chips business is still accounting for 59 percent of its $26.9 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.
Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang introduced the company’s newest Ada Lovelace graphics chips, named for the 19th-century British mathematician regarded as an early pioneer in computer science.
Nvidia said the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 model of the chip will be priced at $1,599 and go on sale on Oct. 12. RTX 4080 models will be available for a price of $899 and $1,199, respectively, and go on sale in November.
Nvidia designs its chips but has them manufactured by partners. Huang said the chips will be made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufaturing (TSMC) with its 4N chip manufacturing technology, a change from Nvidia’s previous generation of flagship gaming chips, which were made by Samsung Electronics.
The Lovelace chips use AI to improve video game graphics. Computing what each pixel on the screen should look like is hard, so Nvidia chips use AI to predict how some pixels should look without doing the entire set of computations. The Lovelace chips have extended that technique to generate entire frames of a game using AI.
Matt Wuebbling, vice president of global GeForce marketing at Nvidia, said the Lovelace chips will be available for sale globally and are not affected by a recently imposed U.S. ban on selling Nvidia’s top data center AI chips to China.
