TAIPEI – When Jensen Huang he enters the stage of the packed building of the NTU, the National Taiwan University where the best youth on the island is trained, dozens of photographers jump to their feet and bombard him with flashes, so as not to miss a single gesture of the hero’s return. Huang, an American by training and studies, returned to Taiwan (a few days after China’s military exercises around the island) to inaugurate the tech fair with his speech Computex. Nvidia, the company that Dennis’ founded in 1993 in a fast food restaurant with two other partners, is today the engine of the artificial intelligence revolution: its chips are essential for powering data centers, which are increasingly larger and thirsty for electricity (and water). Although Computex 2024 is also a kickoff for the so-called Hybrid AI: many things have and will need the cloud and computer centers, but others are starting to happen and will increasingly happen on personal computer of individual users.
Nvidia Rubin, the next superchip
Huang, with the inevitable rocker “nail”, on stage held a sort of lectio magitralis on the present and future of artificial intelligence and obviously on the role of the company in what he called «the next industrial revolution» which will unlock opportunities for 100 trillion dollars in sectors such as information technology, healthcare, transportation and manufacturing. In truth, few new features have been revealed but among the previews there is that of next generation of AI superchips. Last March Nvidia presented Blackwell, it will arrive in 2026 Rubin (in the middle there will be Blackwell Ultra). Huang explained that Nvidia aims to introduce a new version of its flagship AI chips every year, to push the technological limits further.
What will it be used for
In a presentation enriched with artificial intelligence simulations and personal anecdotes, Huang explained that Nvidia’s chip solutions for “AI factories” will unlock opportunities from «100 trillion dollars»: IT, said the CEO of the company based in Santa Clara, Silicon Valley, «is no longer just a tool for storing information or processing data, but a factory to generate intelligence for every sector. What started with accelerated computing led to AI, then generative AI, and now an industrial revolution.”
How will this revolution happen? Huang announced cooperation with major Taiwanese electronics suppliers such as Foxconn, Pegatron, Wistron And Delta Electronics to adopt Nvidia’s AI technologies, such as real-time 3D simulations and AI robot development and deployment, into their manufacturing facilities. For example, Foxconn plans to use Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to develop «digital twins» of its physical factories to optimize equipment layout for operational flow, while AI cameras will help monitor worker safety. During his keynote, Jensen Huang repeatedly highlighted the crucial role of Taiwan’s value chain in Nvidia’s success. A role over which the shadow of Beijing’s desire to reunite the island with mainland China is cast.
Nvidia also announced ACE, a generative AI product capable of creating realistic human avatars for customer support and (especially) for the world of video games, and showed the improvements of Earth-2, the global climate and weather simulation which should lead to major improvements in understanding and predicting increasingly frequent extreme phenomena.
The new era of AI PCs: what changes
Nvidia is still missing one piece: that of processors for personal computers, an area in which the company was born and is present with its video cards (Gpu) but in which, according to rumors, it could be relaunched with big ambitions in 2025 thanks to a deal with another Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer, Mediatek. For now Huang has limited himself to announcing the new generation of “AI notebook” on which its RTX GPUs are combined with the new AMD chips.
Computex 2024 was in fact the stage for the debut of the new generation of notebooks equipped with “native” artificial intelligence functions, i.e. on board and without the need to always go through the cloud. Microsoft calls them Copilot+ PC. Among the companies that have proven most ready for the new generation of Asusanother Taiwanese company, which presented a wide range of notebooks already compatible with the specifications required by Microsoft to have the “Copilot+ PC” label. We were able to see them at work and try. We start in June with the consumer line Vivobook S 15 (inches), with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors and continues with i Vivobook S 14 And S 16 (inches), arriving in a few weeks (until June-July) with the AMD Ryzen AI processors, just announced at Computex. The gaming lines ROG Zephyrus (with G16 model), TUF (with A14 And A15) and the professional one ProArt instead they will also be equipped with graphics cards RTX by Nvidia. Everyone will have the Copilot+ PC “stamp”. To see models with processors Intel instead, we will have to wait for the next generation of Lunar Lake processors, arriving in September. Many other manufacturers have announced their Copilot+ PCs, from Samsung to Acer, from Microsoft itself to MSI and others.
What do these PCs allow you to do? More generally, they fit one on board Npu (neural processing unit) that is, a chip specifically dedicated to artificial intelligence, equipped with power equal to at least 40 TOPS (40 thousand billion operations per second) which is activated with the AI functions of the Windows 11 system. Among these the most interesting is Recall. It’s a sort of super-chronology that every 10 seconds takes a screenshot of the activity going on at that moment; the user can perform a search (example: «trees» and «autumn») and the AI will show all the corresponding frames, from any application. But they are also there Live Captionwhich creates subtitles in many languages (including Italian) and Cocreator, which turns the old Windows Paint into an AI image generator. And Asus also added its software, like StoryCube, which creates a database of photos and videos, categorizing them by origin, subject or location. All software that runs locally, on the PC itself, for privacy reasons (like Recall) or convenience, without relying on the cloud.
