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Fein-Lines: CES 2025—Highlighting the Future With Sony and NVIDIA

NVIDIA Keynote: The Main Event
To get in the queue was long and busy as literally thousands of CES attendees came to hear and see what NVIDIA would announce. Though CES is not about what’s next, but rather about what’s possible, NVIDIA showcased on both fronts. Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, introduced NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, one of the world’s top tech influencers. “I am so thrilled to kick off this show with a keynote by one of the most consequential companies in the world,” Shapiro said. “Today, NVIDIA is pioneering breakthroughs in AI and accelerated computing that touches nearly every person and every business.” I have to say that I have never seen a presentation like the one NVIDIA did for CES 2025. More than 6,000 CES attendees were treated to a cascade of exciting announcements, but this year the number of new announcements was truly amazing.

Of course, we expected to hear about the next generation of  graphics processing units (GPUs); the RTX 5000 series of GPU will soon be upon us, with 92 billion transistors (3X the number in the last generation). The new RTX Blackwell runs at 1.8 terabytes per second and has an amazing 21,760 CUDA cores. (I am getting one for my new computer build.) It is far from cheap (about $1,999), and if I heard correctly, the high end GTX 5090 will go for $2,899. With AI and the broad use of it advancing at light speed (literally), such powerful devices should come as no surprise.

As far as the presentation itself, almost everything shown on the stage was generated by AI. Physical AI, the next phase of AI, is also rapidly approaching. NVIDIA defines this as AI that allows machines to interact with the physical world. Huang filled his stage with his full-sized robots “friends,” and said, “The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is coming.” NVIDIA also announced its Cosmos™ world foundation model, a three-computer system that uses AI to generate a digital twin. It will allow for accelerated data processing and things like simply loading PDFs into a system, which can then become tokens that are commanded by AI, something very sensible for the development of effective robotics. The stage at CES, in fact, was an amazing digital twin of NVIDIA.

It’s just impossible to convey things that are so complicated in detail, but believe me, I was frantically taking notes for I could share some highlights from Huang’s address.

Soon, he said, almost all modern manufacturing will become software dependent. NVIDIA’s big focus in digital manufacturing is the Omniverse™ digital twin. I have been a technology freak for most of my life, but there was so much in the presentation that even someone who understands technology had a difficult time fully understanding it.

NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor is a next-generation processor that delievers next-generation power for self-driving cars. It has 20X the power of today’s processors and is now in full production. The NVIDIA Drive OS computer is now certified as well.

The company also introduced its work and huge advances in three areas of robotics, using artificial intelligence and NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform to generate millions of synthetically generated motions, such as some of what I described above.

Everyone who uses a computer will soon need a supercomputer. NVIDIA announced Project DIGITS, a tiny supercomputer built around a super-secret new chip. It is supposed to rival the affordability of some data centers.

Hitting the limits of my ability to explain in detail any of the mind-blowing reality of the tech that was presented, I highly recommend viewing Huang’s full CES presentation on his company website.

The Success of Tech Is Still Dependent on Hardware
Today, there are so many things that are or are about to be possible, but not without the hardware that will allow the vast abilities of AI to work. What you can count on for sure is that this technology is coming at light speed and manufacturers need to be educated and prepared to engage in all that is and will be next.

As ever, CES does not disappoint. I am already looking forward to next year.

Dan Feinberg is a technical editor at I-Connect007 and founder of Fein-Lines Associates.

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