Nvidia Corp. is betting on the growing demand for artificial intelligence-accelerated laptops and workstations with its latest computer chips, the Nvidia RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPUs, which were unveiled early today at the MWC 2024 mobile conference in Barcelona.

The company said its new graphics processing units will be integrated with multiple new workstation models from partners that include Dell Technologies Inc., HP Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Micro-Star International Co. Ltd. when they go on sale this spring.

The latest chips will expand Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace-based architecture lineup, which already includes the more powerful RTX 2000, 3000, 3500, 4000 and 5000 Ada Generation Laptop GPUs.

Nvidia explained that generative AI and hybrid work environments are becoming new industry standards, creating a need for more powerful workstations that can run intensive applications locally, without hosting those workloads in the cloud. The company sees AI being adopted across multiple industries to drive efficiencies in areas professional design, content creation and more.

The RTX 500 and 1000 Ada GPUs are said to include a neural processing unit that’s integrated within the central processing unit, as well as an RTX GPU that includes Tensor Cores for processing AI locally. The NPU helps by offloading lighter AI tasks to the CPU, leaving the GPU to handle more demanding tasks with its 682 trillion operations per second performance.

Nvidia says the new GPUs are aimed at light and thin laptops, with the RTX 500 packing 4 gigabytes of dedicated memory, rising to 6 gigabytes in the RTX 1000.

That should be enough to tackle a wide range of demanding workloads. Nvidia cited examples such as videoconferencing with AI effects, video streaming with AI upscaling, and generative AI applications.

According to the company, the RTX 500 GPU provides 14 times the generative AI performance for image creating models such as Stable Diffusion, as well as a three-times boost in photo editing tasks and a 10-times improvement in graphics performance for 3D rendering tasks. That should ensure massive productivity gains, the company said.

In another example, Nvidia said video editors will realize significant efficiency gains for tasks such as removing background noise with AI, while graphic designers will be able to refine blurry images with AI upscaling.

The new chips aren’t as powerful as the other GPUs in Nvidia’s Ada Generation Laptop lineup, which are designed for even heavier workloads such as deep learning super sampling for visualizing photorealistic renders in close to real time. The company expanded that lineup earlier this month with the launch of its RTX 2000 Ada chip, which is designed to handle photorealistic ray-tracing applications.

Image: Nvidia