Nvidia has been one of the most vocal believers in the potential value of metaverse applications, but all the virtual world-building involved in creating these applications requires workhorse workstations.
With that in mind, Nvidia and Intel, competitors in some markets and occasionally partners in others, have teamed up to launch new workstation processor architectures employing the W-Series (“W” for workstation) of Intel's newest Xeon processors launched last month, working with Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada generation GPUs, as well as Nvidia ConnectX-6 SmartNICs. The W-Series includes the W-3400 Expert Workstation processor and the W-2400 Mainstream Workstation processor.
“Designed for professional creators, engineers and data scientists, this platform includes industrial-grade features for the most demanding users… to accelerate deep learning and AI algorithms,” said Roger Chandler, vice president and general manager of Creator and Workstation Solutions in the Client Computing Group at Intel, during a launch event webcast.
He added, “Combining our new Intel Xeon workstation processors with the latest Nvidia GPUs will unleash the innovation and creativity of professional creators, artists, engineers, designers, data scientists and power users across the world.”
In a blog post, Nvidia added that it sees the computing power of the new workstation processors as significant for the development of metaverse applications for customers that already are using the company’s Omniverse Enterprise, a platform for creating and operating these applications.
Nvidiia has continued to expand the capabilities of Omniverse Enterprise, and the launch of the new workstation processors, like the recent exansion of Omniverse to the cloud also fits with the company’s objective to make it easier for more users to take advantage of the platform.
BMW Group, for example, is using Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise to design an end-to-end digital twin of an entire factory, a project that the companies discussed back at Nvidia’s GTC event in 2021. “This involves collaboration with thousands of planners, product engineers and facility managers in a single virtual environment to design, plan, simulate and optimize highly complex manufacturing systems before a factory is actually built or a new product is integrated into the real world,” the blog post stated.
The new W-Series of processor address projects with such massive scale, as well as others that involve AI-augmented workflows, extended reality applications and more, with performance derived from up to 56 cores in a single socket, and a redesigned memory controller and larger L3 cache, delivering up to 28% more single-threaded and 120% more multi-threaded performance over the previous-generation Xeon W processors.
The Nvidia RTX 6000, built on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, chips in with 142 third-generation RT Cores, 568 fourth-generation Tensor Cores and 18,176 latest-generation CUDA cores combined with 48GB of high-performance graphics memory to provide up to 2x ray-tracing, AI, graphics and compute performance over the previous generation. The ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs support high-bandwidth 3D rendering and computer-aided design tasks, as well as traditional office work with line-speed network connectivity support based on two 25 Gbps ports and GPUDirect technology for increasing GPU bandwidth by 10x over standard NICs.
Workstations using the new processors are already available for pre-order from BOXX as the Apexx W Class, and in the HP Z8 Fury, with more coming soon from other workstation system integrators, Nvidia said.