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NVIDIA Hopes To Sell More Chips By Bringing AI Programming To the Masses

Posted by Soulskill on from the infinite-monkeys-can-create-the-singularity dept.

jfruh writes: Artificial intelligence typically requires heavy computing power, which can only help manufacturers of specialized chip manufacturers like NVIDIA. That's why the company is pushing its Digits software, which helps users design and experiment with neural networks. Version 2 of digits moves out of the command line and comes with a GUI interface in an attempt to move interest beyond the current academic market; it also makes programming for multichip configurations possible.

1 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Holy Hardware Batman by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Informative

    From TFA there was no pic of the UI, nor any mention of tech specs aside from a lot of nebulous details. From nVidia's website ...

    * https://developer.nvidia.com/d...

    DIGITS DevBox includes:

    * Four TITAN X GPUs with 12GB of memory per GPU
    * 64GB DDR4
    * Asus X99-E WS workstation class motherboard with 4-way PCI-E Gen3 x16 support
    * Core i7-5930K 6 Core 3.5GHz desktop processor
    * Three 3TB SATA 6Gb 3.5â Enterprise Hard Drive in RAID5
    * 512GB PCI-E M.2 SSD cache for RAID
    * 250GB SATA 6Gb Internal SSD
    * 1600W Power Supply Unit
    * Ubuntu 14.04
    * NVIDIA-qualified driver
    * NVIDIA® CUDA® Toolkit 7.0
    * NVIDIA® DIGITSâ SW
    * Caffe, Theano, Torch, BIDMach

    .. holy crap is that a lot of GPU horsepower "just" for AI. Oh look, they are running Ubuntu :-)

    They are really trying to get people on board about how much better / faster their GPU solutions are ...

    * http://www.nvidia.com/object/m...

    The problem is that there are lot of "niche" use cases. If your problem domain maps to the GPU then yeah, mjaor speedup. If not, well, then you're SOL running on "slow" CPUs.