Nvidia's new AI chip crams $10,000 of power into a $1,299 CPU

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Nvidia just announced a chip that crams $10,000 worth of power into a tiny box that costs just AU$1,299.

But it's not for your laptop. The chip, Jetson Xavier, is for robots.

"This little computer is going to be the brain of future robots," company co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang proudly announced at Nvidia's Monday press conference at Computex in Taiwan.

"Robots that drive, that fly, that swim, that goes underground, that picks strawberries, picks lettuce, picks apples, helps you in the lab, like Jarvis handing you your screwdriver," Huang explained, "this little computer is the brains of future intelligent machines."

Jetson Xavier is packed with six processors which can run 30 trillion operations per second. It took five years to be created: Three years to design, Huang said, and two years to architect. It took over 8,000 people to design and develop.

"This is the single longest processor project we have ever done in our company," he said. It has roughly the same processing power as a $10,000 workstation equipped with GPUs, Huang added. Plus, it runs on 30 watts.

"Essentially, a $10,000 workstation, 1,000 watts of performance, now fits in my hand for 30 watts."

It's not Nvidia's first foray into AI chips. Its existing technology is already being used by companies for autonomous warehouse robots, fruit-picking robots and agriculture robots. Jetson Xavier, though, is 20-times more powerful than Nvidia's previous line of AI chips, according to Huang.

It'll be shipping to developers from $1,299 by August.

Huang, who opened the conference by throwing sandwiches and cookies to the crowd of journalists, also showed two other AI processors. The Drive Pegasus, which flaunts 280 teraflops of deep learning, is for completely autonomous taxis, while the Drive Xavier is for semi-autonomous cars.