NVIDIA Just Unveiled a Personal Supercomputer That’s a Jump to Light Speed for AI Users

Hoo, boy. NVIDIA might’ve stolen the show at CES before it even began. The world’s largest annual consumer tech show, held in Las Vegas every January, didn’t entirely start until today, but NVIDIA announced late last night at 6:30 PM PST that starting in May, it’ll sell you a “desktop supercomputer” about the size of a Mac mini for about the price of a mid-range television and home audio setup. Huh??

How can something so tiny contain so much (super)computing power? Is it, like all computers, full of magic? Don’t be a silly goose. Of course it is. What we want to know is whether it’s full of black magic or the regular kind. Or maybe that old-timey kind with a “k,” magick.

how pow, powerful

“With Project DIGITS, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said during the unveiling. “Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.”

Headlines the morning after the announcement are echoing and blaring that Digits is “1,000 times as powerful as a laptop.” It didn’t just raise my eyebrows. It made them fly off into the atmosphere, where they’re now hanging in a low-pressure system over the Bronx.

For the low, low price of $3,000—less than the cost of a MacBook Pro M4 Max—you can buy a personal, desktop supercomputer the size of a box turtle that has more power than Beyonce and the Space Shuttle put together?

FLOPping around from excitement

Notably NVIDIA’s press announcement doesn’t make the claim that it’s 1,000 times more powerful than a laptop, and it’s not on their webpage for DIGITS. So where did it come from?

NVIDIA says DIGITS provides one petaFLOPS of “AI computing performance.” And because I feel the grammar police lining up a blowdart aimed at me, the “ps” in “petaFLOPS” stands for “per second,” so the “s” says even when it’s a singular noun.

Live Science did some math when it reported its story on DIGITS, and referencing this IBM post on measuring supercomputer power, they concluded that since the most powerful supercomputers in the world have a processing of about 1,000 petaFLOPS—which is a million times more powerful than a laptop, according to IBM—that with one petaFLOPS of power, DIGITS would be 1,000 times as powerful as a laptop.

Broadly speaking, though, how powerful a computer is depends on which task you’re referring to. It may be 1,000 times as powerful as a (typical? High-end?) laptop at wielding AI, but not 1,000 times as powerful for, say, editing videos. So DIGITS could end up as the hardware version of the killer app for AI development and use, but not the be-all-end-all for the masses who simply want a kick-ass, powerful computer for home use. We’ll have to dig more into its specifications and details as they become available closer to its launch.

Want to know what it looks like? Us too. NVIDIA shared a couple of images during the launch, but the design doesn’t seem to be finalized. What we see now might not match what we see when it’s released this May. You can register to be notified when it becomes available for sale or pre-sale.

NVIDIA’s on track to become the most valuable company in the world (again), after approving investors rallied its stock the morning after NVIDIA’s announcement. As for us, healthy skepticism means we’ll want to delve into DIGITS as more information becomes available. Stay tuned.