Nvidia recently revealed details about its new AI graphics processors, and one of them is named for a scientist familiar to many space fans. Vera Rubin, the namesake for one of Nvidia's new AI GPU platforms, was the American scientist credited with discovering dark matter early in her career.

The Vera Rubin die will have two GPUs sandwiched together, delivering over 50 petaflops of FP4 performance per chip. Nvidia claims that a full rack of these will deliver over 3.6 exaflops of performance—that's more than three times what's possible on existing Blackwell hardware.

On the near horizon — H2 2025 — Nvidia will release Blackwell Ultra, a GPU that’ll come in several configurations. A single Ultra chip will offer the same 20 petaflops of AI performance as Blackwell, but with 288GB of memory — up from 192GB in vanilla Blackwell.