Nvidia's Blackwell: A Colossus of Compute, but at What Cost?

Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture, exemplified by the RTX PRO 6000, boasts a gargantuan GB202 die (750mm², 92.2 billion transistors) and a staggering 188 SM units, delivering unmatched compute performance. A deep dive into its microarchitecture reveals details on instruction caching, execution units, and memory subsystems, comparing it to AMD's RDNA4. While Blackwell exhibits some imperfections, like L2 cache performance and per-unit efficiency, its sheer scale dwarfs the competition, making it the largest consumer GPU available. This ambition, however, comes at a cost, including power consumption (600W) and L2 latency. The article concludes with a perspective on the future GPU landscape.