NVIDIA's Mini Supercomputer Draws Skepticism from Competitors: Touted for FP4 Power, Yet Dubbed 'Less Practical Than a Gaming PC'
2025-01-10

At CES 2025, NVIDIA unveiled Project DIGITS, a miniature supercomputer powered by the novel GraceBlackwell superchip, boasting a computational prowess of 1 PFLOPs at FP4 precision. Nonetheless, this announcement swiftly ignited a debate. Raja Koduri, a seasoned chip designer who has contributed to AMD and Intel, lambasted the claim, arguing that the FLOPs of Project DIGITS should be divided by 4, while its price tag doubles. Aimed at the niche market for compact AI supercomputers, Project DIGITS starts at $3,000 and is equipped with the GB10 chip—a GraceCPU featuring 20 energy-efficient cores, 128GB of unified memory, and 4TB of storage. Despite NVIDIA's optimistic outlook, competitors and experts have raised doubts about its cost-effectiveness, emphasizing that its FP16 performance is unremarkable and comparable to gaming graphics cards within the same price range. This controversy has significantly influenced NVIDIA's brand reputation and the trajectory of the AI hardware market.