Patel says SemiAnalysis initially doubted Jensen's 25x Blackwell claim, predicting only 15-20x improvement.
“Jensen, when he originally launched Blackwell, had claimed it would be a 25x improvement. And at the time, no one believed him. Right? It's Jensen, right?”
Patel's benchmarking found Blackwell is 30x faster than Hopper on DeepSeek v3, exceeding Jensen's 25x claim.
“In DeepSeek v three, Blackwell is 30 x faster than Hopper on on somewhere on the continuum.”
Patel emailed Jensen documenting skepticism about Blackwell's 25x claim from industry observers.
“I emailed him. I like, hey, Jensen. You know, back in 2024, you said or back back when you launched Blackwell, said '24 twenty five x.”
Patel says Hopper GPU failure rates improved to 5% while Blackwell remains at 10-15%, expecting higher rates for next generation.
“hopper's now at 5%, but black belt's still 10 to 15%. Wow. Right? Actually started out higher than that. Sure. And when a new generation comes out, it's gonna be higher than 15%.”
Patel finds 10x performance TCO advantage for Blackwell over H100 at certain operating points.
“But at other points, you can have a 10x performance TCO benefit from going with a more expensive Blackwell server than a cheaper H100 server.”
Patel says Blackwell cost is up 50-70% over Hopper but performance exceeds 2x, making it an obvious choice.
“while cost is only up, know, call it 50% or 60% or 70% versus Hopper, the performance is well north of 2x, right?”
Patel explains Blackwell introduces third memory tier within Tensor Cores requiring complex programming model for full performance.
“Now with Blackwell, there's actually even a third tier of memory, which is memory within the Tensor Core.”
Patel quantifies Hopper performance improved 30-40% over 2024 with Blackwell showing similar gains in months.
“Even Hopper in January 24 to December 2024, you still had like a 30%, 40% performance improvement. And likewise for Blackwell, you've seen a similar sort of improvement, right?”
Patel predicts another 50-100% Blackwell performance improvement from software optimization of standard libraries.
“I see another 50% to doubling in the cards, just from the fact that there is so much low hanging fruit or performance left on the table if you are using the general open libraries, right? Whether it's cuDNN, VLM, SGLANG, all these other things,”
Patel predicts general-purpose Blackwell users could see another performance doubling over the next year from software improvements.
“for the general purpose user, yeah, you're going to have another doubling of performance potentially on the tables over the next year.”
Patel reveals NVIDIA doubled system-level testing time for Blackwell compared to Hopper generation.
“NVIDIA learning from the issues on Hopper, with Blackwell, they actually doubled the time for system level test.”
Patel estimates Blackwell delivers 10-15x cost improvement for inference despite NVIDIA claiming 30x at GTC.
“But now, like, Blackwell, NVIDIA's pitching 10 to 15 x improvement in cost. It's like, well, you know, they're massaging the numbers marketing.”
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