The Las Vegas Sphere isn’t even a year old yet, but it’s already garnered a lot of attention — and now, Nvidia has revealed its role in coordinating the almost 750,000 square feet of displays both outside and inside the building.
The outside screen, known as the Exosphere, is made up of 1.2 million lights resembling (and known as) hockey pucks. Each of these hockey pucks has 48 LEDs, which means there are about 57,600,000 LEDs covering the outside of the spherical building altogether. Unsurprisingly, it’s the biggest LED screen in the entire world.
On the inside, the event space is made up of a seating area for around 17,000 people and a gigantic wraparound screen that covers all visible wall and ceiling space. The display is 160,000 square feet with a 16K by 16K resolution — here’s a video that shows the scale and shape of it quite well.
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U2 opened the $2.3 billion Las Vegas Sphere last night and the visuals are incredible 🤯pic.twitter.com/szKa5DobRd
— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) September 30, 2023
Now, to power both of these displays, Nvidia uses rack-mounted workstations equipped with 150 of its RTX A6000 GPUs. This setup is capable of delivering three layers of 16K resolution at 60 frames per second (fps).
To keep all of the different display panels and programmable LEDs perfectly synchronized, the Sphere uses Nvidia BlueField data processing units (DPUs) and Nvidia’s Rivermax media streaming software — which can achieve sub-microsecond accuracy.
Since every RTX A6000 GPU has over 10K cores, 48GB of memory, and a 300-watt thermal design power (TDP), the total reaches 1,612,800 cores, 7,200GB of memory, and a 45,000W TDP. This means, when all 150 GPUs are running at maximum, the power consumption is 45,000W. This is just a drop in the lake when it comes to the venue’s total power consumption, which is estimated to reach a peak load of 28 megawatts — or 28 million normal watts. Reportedly, that’s enough electricity to power 21,000 homes. For the environmentally concerned, the Sphere plans to get 70% of this power from solar energy and offsets the rest with renewable energy credits.
Some might say it’s too much power usage for too little reason, but what’s 21,000 homes’ worth of power in a world with almost 8 billion people? Amazing, creative, large-scale, public-serving projects are the right kind of power expenditure — it’s the inefficient operating practices of big businesses all over the world that need to go.
