Nvidia sees itself as a hardware overlord of the “metaverse” and dropped some hints about the operation of a parallel 3D universe in which our cartoon selves can work, play and interact.
Chipbiz'en har tilføjet nyt VVS i Omniverse - en underliggende hardware- og softwaremotor, der fungerer som en planetkerne, der smelter virtuelle fællesskaber sammen i et alternativt 3D-univers. Omniverse bliver også brugt til at skabe avatarer for at forbedre den virkelige verdens oplevelser i biler, hospitaler og robotter.
“We’re not telling people to replace what they do, we are enhancing what they do,” said Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse platform, during a press briefing.
The Omniverse announcements came during the company’s GPU Technology Conference denne uge. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang vil tale om mange af disse meddelelser tirsdag.
jensen as you’ve never seen him before. Source: Nvidia. Click to enlarge
En sådan meddelelse er Omniverse avatarer, som kan generere interaktive, intelligente AI-avatarer til ting som at hjælpe spisende gæster med at bestille mad eller hjælpe en chauffør med at parkere eller navigere bedre på vejene.
Nvidia gave an example of a conversational avatar to replace servers in restaurants. When ordering food, an AI system – represented by an on-screen avatar – could converse in real time using speech recognition and natural intelligence techniques, and use computer vision to capture a person’s mood, and recommend dishes based on the knowledge base.
Til det skal avataren køre flere AI-modeller – for eksempel tale, billedgenkendelse og kontekst – samtidigt, hvilket kan være en udfordring. Virksomheden har skabt Unified Compute Framework, der modellerer AI som mikrotjenester, så apps kan køre i et enkelt eller hybridsystem.
Nvidia har allerede underliggende AI-systemer som Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation-modellen – et monolitisk transformersprog udviklet i fællesskab med Microsoft. Systemet vil nu blive tilbudt på dets DGX AI-hardware.
Omniverse Avatar er også den underliggende teknologi i Drive Concierge – an in-car AI assistant that is a “personal concierge in the car that will be on call for you,” said Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Embedded and Edge Computing.
AI systems in cars represented by interactive characters can understand a driver and the car’s occupants through habits, voice and interactions. Accordingly the AI system can make phone calls or offer recommendations of nearby places to eat.
Using cameras and other sensors, the system can also see if a driver is asleep, or alert a rider if they forget something in the car. The AI system’s messages are represented through interactive characters or interfaces on screens.
Gammel hund, nye tricks
The metaverse concept isn’t new – it has existed through Linden Lab’s Second Life, or games like The Sims. Nvidia hopes to break proprietary walls and create a united metaverse so users to theoretically jump between universes created by different companies.
Under briefingen henviste Nvidia ikke til at hjælpe Facebook med at opfylde sin vision om en fremtid omkring metaverset, som er i centrum for dets rebranding til Meta.
But Nvidia is roping other companies into bringing their 3D work to the Omniverse platform through its software connectors. That list includes Esri’s ArcGIS cityEngine, which helps create urban environments in 3D, and Replica Studio’s AI voice engine, which can simulate real voice for animated characters
“What makes this all possible is the foundation of USD, or Universal Scene Description. USD is the HTML of 3D – an important element because it allows for all these software products to take advantage of the virtual worlds we are talking about,” Kerris said. USD was created by Pixar to share 3D assets in a collaborative way.
Nvidia annoncerede også Omniverse Enterprise – et abonnementstilbud med en softwarestak til at hjælpe virksomheder med at skabe 3D-arbejdsgange, der kan kobles til Omniverse-platformen. Til en pris af $9,000 om året er tilbuddet rettet mod industrivertikaler som teknik og underholdning og vil være tilgængeligt gennem forhandlere, der inkluderer Dell, Lenovo, PNY og Supermicro.
The company is also using the Omniverse platform to generate synthetic data on which to train “digital twins,” or virtual simulations of real-world objects. The ISAAC SIM can train robots through synthetic data based on real-world and virtual information. The SIM allows the introduction of new objects, camera views and lighting to create custom data sets on which to train robots.
En bilækvivalent er Drive SIM, som kan skabe realistiske scener gennem simulerede kameraer til autonom kørsel. SIM-kortet inddrager data fra den virkelige verden for at træne autonomt kørende AI-modeller. Kameralinsemodellerne er simulerede og optager virkelige fænomener som bevægelsessløring, rullende lukker og LED-flimmer.
Nvidia is working closely with sensor makers to replicate Drive SIM data accurately. The camera, radar, lidar and ultrasonic sensor models are all path-traced using RTX graphics technology, according to Danny Shapiro, Nvidia’s vice president for automotive.
Virksomheden flettede nogle hardware-meddelelser sammen i den overordnede Omniverse-fortælling.
Slut dig til den nye generation
Den næste generation af Jetson AGX Orin udviklerkort vil være tilgængelig for producenter i første kvartal næste år. Den har 12 CPU-kerner baseret på Arm Cortex-A78-design, 32 GB LPDDR5 RAM og leverer 200 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) ydeevne.
Drive Hyperion 8 er en computerplatform til biler, som har dual Drive Orin SoCs og leverer ydeevne på op til 500 TOPS. Platformen har 12 kameraer, ni radarer, en lidar og 12 ultralydssensorer. Det vil gå ind i køretøjer produceret i 2024 og har et modulært design, så bilproducenter kun kan bruge de funktioner, de har brug for. Biler med ældre Nvidia-computere kan opgraderes til Drive Hyperion 8.
Nvidia annoncerede også Quantum-2 InfiniBand switch, which has 57 billion transistors and is being made using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s 7nm process. It can process 66.5 billion packets per second, and has 64 ports for 400Gbit/sec data transfers, or 128 ports for 200Gbit/sec transfers, we’re told.
Firmaet talte også op Morpheus – en AI-ramme, som den afslørede tidligere i år, der gør det muligt for cybersikkerhedsleverandører at identificere og advare virksomheder om uregelmæssig adfærd i et netværk eller datacenter. Rammen identificerer subtile ændringer i applikationer, brugere eller netværkstrafik for at identificere uregelmæssigheder og mistænkelig adfærd.
Morpheus draws the data it needs from Nvidia’s BlueField SmartNICs/Data Processing Units, which have been imbued with new powers thanks to an upgrade to the DOCA SDK that is to Bluefield DPUs as CUDA is to Nvidia’s GPUs.
The DOCA upgrade – version 1.2 – can also “build metered cloud services that control resource access, validate each application and user [and] isolate potentially compromised machines.” DOCA 1.2 also lets Bluefield devices authenticate software and hardware authentication, apply line-rate data cryptography, and support distributed firewalls that run on the SmartNIC. Nvidia told Registret Palo Alto har oplevet en 5x forbedring af firewall-ydeevnen, når de kører værktøjerne i distribueret tilstand på SmartNIC'er.
Apropos AI, GPU-giganten også udvidet its Launchpad program, where it will offer short-term access to AI hardware and software through Equinix data centers in the US, Europe, Japan and Singapore. The latter three locations are Launchpad’s first presences outside the USA, giving Nvidia hope that its function as an AI on-ramp might be more widely adopted.
Et andet nyt tilbud er et nyt snit af RIVA-konversations-AI-værktøjet det er sagt to be capable of creating a custom human-like voice in a day, based on just 30 minutes of sample speech. Nvidia thinks that’s just the ticket for orgs that want to offer custom speech interfaces. ®
Kilde: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/11/09/nvidia_metaverse/
