Nvidia unveiled the Rubin CPX GPU earlier this week at the AI Technology Conference as part of its next-generation data center portfolio, which is designed to accelerate inference workloads. Rubin CPX, in particular, focuses on compute rather than bandwidth to form the other part of a "disaggregated" AI architecture that will kick off with Vera Rubin next year. Today, however, a closer look at its silicon suggests there might be more to this AI accelerator than Nvidia has let on, with some speculating that it could even lay the groundwork for an RTX 6090.
High Yield, an independent semiconductor analyst, recently extended his work to Rubin CPX, labelling the up-close die shot Nvidia released as part of the press material. This is just an artistic render—which could be inaccurate, so take the news with a healthy dose of skepticism— but that didn't stop High Yield from discovering something strange: the presence of graphics-specific hardware blocks. He found a full set of Raster Output Pipelines (ROP), raster units, and even display engines on Rubin CPX — all of which are components irrelevant to AI tasks.
