At SC24, NVIDIA announced a new Grace Blackwell platform. The NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 is a new platform that combines two Arm-based Grace CPUs along with four Blackwell GPUs. It is also notable because it seems in the last week or so NVIDIA has taken the axe to a different but once hyped NVL platform.
This is the New NVIDIA GB200 NVL4
At SC24, the NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 platforms with two NVIDIA Grace CPUs and four NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs made its way onto the scene. NVIDIA has higher-end platforms like the NVIDIA NVL72 and NVL36, but it is also making a number of Grace Blackwell system options for lower power deployments. Lower power is relative here as this should be a just over 6kW in a server with NICs, SSDs, and other components. Just for some fun context, the NVIDIA DGX-1 or HGX-1 platform only used around 3.5kW.
Something very neat about this platform is that the boards we have seen have six MCIO connectors beneath each CPU for PCIe connectivity. What is missing is the custom networking module that we found on another NVL platform. Given there are two Grace CPUs, we would expect 144 (2x 72) Arm Neoverse V2 cores.
For those looking at this NVL4 module, then looking at a NVL72 node, they might look very similar at first. One of the big differences is that the NVL72 has the edge connectors for the NVL72 spine and has only half of the compute resources of the NVL4.
As such, NVIDIA is more focused on the NVL4 being a large node with up to 1.3TB of combined coherent memory.
Final Words
It was an interesting day seeing one NVL platform looking like it will be at least delayed until a future generation (GB300?) while this NVL4 platform was released. Hopefully this one comes to market so folks can get GB200 platforms with less than the significantly higher power and higher GPU count platforms that NVIDIA offers. NVIDIA also said that the GB200 NVL4 is slated to ship in the second half of 2025.
