CES 2025 was a GPU keynote in a robot costume

The convention center in Las Vegas hosted approximately nine thousand companies last week and roughly all of them said the word "AI" from a stage. The only part that will still matter in six months came from Nvidia.

RTX 50-series#

Blackwell hits consumer cards. The headline specs are real — GDDR7, more memory bandwidth, a genuinely improved encoder — but the marketing number is not a rasterization number. It is a DLSS 4 number, and DLSS 4 introduces multi-frame generation, which produces up to three interpolated frames per rendered frame.

Comparing that against last generation's single generated frame and printing the ratio as a performance multiple is, let us be diplomatic, a choice. The underlying rendering improvement generation-over-generation is meaningful but nothing like the number on the slide. If you are buying a card to run a compiler and occasionally a game, look for pure raster benchmarks and mentally discard everything with "AI" in the chart title.

What is unambiguously good: the memory. For anyone running local models, VRAM is the binding constraint and always has been. More of it at higher bandwidth changes what fits.

Project DIGITS#

The more interesting announcement, because it is a new shape of thing: a desktop-sized machine built on a GB10 Grace Blackwell part with 128 GB of unified memory, aimed squarely at developers who want to prototype against large models without renting an H100 by the hour.

The pitch is that you develop locally on the same CUDA stack you deploy to. That has always been Nvidia's actual moat — not the silicon, the software continuity — and this is that moat extended down to a box on your desk. The stated price is around $3,000, which sounds like a lot until you price four months of cloud GPU.

Two open questions: sustained thermal behavior in that form factor, and whether the memory bandwidth is enough to make the capacity useful rather than theoretical. Capacity without bandwidth means you can load the model and then watch it think very slowly.

everything else#

The show floor's other theme was putting a language model into objects that did not ask for one. An AI-enabled grill. An AI-enabled crib. A smart ring for your dog. This is the phase of a hype cycle where the technology gets stapled to inventory, and it is worth remembering it happened with "smart," with "cloud," and with "blockchain."

The signal in the noise: robotics is quietly getting real. Not the humanoids on the keynote stage — those are demos with a lot of teleoperation behind them — but the boring warehouse and inspection stuff that has actual unit economics. That is where the useful engineering jobs will be.

Meanwhile, three separate companies announced a foldable laptop. Nobody asked for a foldable laptop.