Nvidia on Monday demonstrated its next-generation tray for its data center GPU known as Rubin Ultra, which is due to arrive sometime in 2027. The Rubin Ultra features four compute chiplets and features 1TB of HBM4E memory, making it the industry's first AI accelerator equipped with a terabyte of memory. The Rubin Ultra platform will use the company's new rack-scale design known as Kyber, which will integrate 144 GPU packages, greatly improving performance over the current NVL72 rack design.
Based on what Nvidia demonstrated, the quad-chiplet Rubin Ultra package will adopt a new packaging technology, though we are not sure about exactly how the GPU is implemented, as its heatspreader hides everything. In fact, we do not even know whether Rubin Ultra has taped out yet. The only thing that strikes the eye is the relatively small size of the Rubin Ultra package, which may mean that we are dealing with a stacked design, though that is speculation.
The Nvidia Rubin Ultra tray also nearly completely lacks cables, which will simplify server assembly, but this could mean that Nvidia will sell complete trays, reducing the role of its partners to essentially assembling rack-scale machines and not building actual motherboards and server trays.
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With Rubin Ultra, Nvidia will also adopt a new type of rack called Kyber, which will use vertical rather than horizontal trays as well as liquid cooling by default. The new rack will enable Nvidia to put 144 GPU packages into one rack, which means that Kyber NVL144 systems based on Rubin Ultra GPUs will offer at least four times more performance than Oberon NVL72 based on 72 Rubin GPUs, as the system will double the number of GPU tiles per package and the number of packages.
In addition, Nvidia's Kyber rack will upgrade the NVLink switch from a 6th Generation switch to a 7th Generation switch, which will retain the 3600 GB/s speed but will enable increasing the number of GPUs. In addition, Nvidia plans to introduce its CX9-1600G Ethernet processor to speed up scale-out communications.
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