I don’t think it’s possible to tell from that keynote whether Blackwell-Ultra is “just another H200” (which was also more bandwidth, and possibly a respin, not just more capacity) or if it is indeed a process shrink or more. Besides the insistence on pushing the limits of everything, the only other hint is H100 and H200 have the same “mini die shot” on the slide while Blackwell/Blackwell-Ultra are different, which is hardly conclusive.
However if Blackwell-Ultra is a H200-level change or less, then let me say bluntly that the “yearly cadence” would be complete BS. No one inside a GPU company would consider that a yearly cadence, especially when there have been companies with true yearly cadences in the mobile market with architectural changes nearly every year.
Honestly NVIDIA has too much money *not* to be making a new flagship chip every year. They need to increase their R&D as much as possible as quickly as possible to maintain their competitive advantage, but it’s hard to greatly increase team sizes in a way that doesn’t result in diminishing returns and other inefficiencies (never mind just replacing the people leaving because they made more than enough money to retire on their stock grants!)
Creating a process shrink of the flagship on a tick-tock cadence is the probably the easiest way to spend more money by creating a new independent team without affecting the rest of the roadmap. That doesn’t mean they are actually doing it, but I could not reasonably defend their failure to do so, it would highlight a catastrophic failure of execution to still only have one new flagship every two years while soon making nearly $100B revenue a year from that single chip…