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from the whatever-happened-to-Amdahl's-Law? dept.
Jensen Huang Says Nvidia-Branded ARM CPUs Are a Possibility
According to comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during a conference call yesterday, we could see Nvidia-branded CPUs in the future, setting the stage for a new level of competition with Intel and AMD.
[...] However, during yesterday's briefing, Timothy Prickett Morgan from TheNextPlatform asked Jensen Huang, "Will you actually take an implementation of something like Neoverse first and make an Nvidia-branded CPU to drive it into the data center? Will you actually make the reference chip for those who just want it and actually help them run it?"
"Well, the first of all you've made an amazing observation, which is all three options are possible," Huang responded, "[...] So now with our backing and Arm's serious backing, the world can stand on that foundation and realize that they can build server CPUs. Now, some people would like to license the cores and build a CPU themselves. Some people may decide to license the cores and ask us to build those CPUs or modify ours."
"It is not possible for one company to build every single version of them," Huang continued, "but we will have the entire network of partners around Arm that can take the architectures we come up with and depending on what's best for them, whether licensing the core, having a semi-custom chip made, or having a chip that we made, any of those any of those options are available. Any of those options are available, we're open for business and we would like the ecosystem to be as rich as possible, with as many options as possible."
Also at Wccftech.
Now Nvidia Is Armed To The Teeth
Huang reminded everyone that we are at the end of Moore's Law, and that we are in the era of accelerated computing – what we would prefer to call hybrid and highly tuned collectives of computing – and that Nvidia was really after creating one overarching (and hopefully not overreaching) architecture that would come from one company and span the entire $250 billion semiconductor total addressable market for datacenter, edge, embedded, and client markets.
So, when you look at a TAM like that and you realize that Arm still has a chance to take a chunk of the $67 billion or so in datacenter compute chips that are sold, then $12 billion in cash and $28 billion in stock issuance doesn't seem that expensive.
NVIDIA's Arm Acquisition Against British National Interest Says Union
NVIDIA Corporation's $40 billion acquisition of British chip design house Arm is at the receiving end of a backlash from the U.K. trade union Unite. Members of the union have requested British members of parliament to review the deal, on concerns that the acquisition is not in the best interest of the United Kingdom and that it will end up winding down the chip designer's operations in the country reports ITPro.
The trade union's concerns come after shadow business secretary Ed Milliband asked the government to ensure that the acquisition would not result in Arm's headquarters being moved outside the U.K. last week. Arm is one of the most valuable companies on the far side of the Atlantic, and its importance in the tech world is only set to grow in the near future. While the company's chip architecture has traditionally been used to create microprocessors and other components for low power devices such as smartphones, advances in semiconductor fabrication and packaging have allowed the company to expand its presence into applications such as supercomputers.
Previously: Nvidia Announces $40 Billion Acquisition of Arm Holdings
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @09:26PM (3 children)
Nvidia must be hella careful or else they will kill the golden goose bought for 40B.
A main attraction of ARM was that the licensees did not have to compete against ARM itself.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Thursday September 17 2020, @10:37PM (2 children)
More like a bronze goose. I may be wrong here, I'm pretty sure ARM's revenue is a few hundred million. envy-diva is something like $15 billion. they aren't buying it for licensing profit, nor do they give a crap about who uses ARM. They wanted a shitty cheap datacenter CPU to go with their GPU-intensive clusters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2020, @03:20AM (1 child)
Doubt it.
ARM's design was good for low-power CPU. But it's main value today is that it has become the ecosystem for smartphones - that's why it's worth 40B.
Once smartphone industry move away from it, it's just another CPU architecture that will die off.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Friday September 18 2020, @04:13AM
you doubt what? that nvidia is trying to do an ARM+GPU hybrid chip for the datacenter, something they have been trying to openly do since 2011 (google project denver)? ARM may be the ecosystem for smartphones, but for ARM itself - it's actually half a billion dollars in the red this year.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday September 16 2020, @09:37PM (4 children)
It will be great news for RISC-V
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 16 2020, @10:22PM (3 children)
RISC-V is a pipe dream at this point. Could Nvidia kill ARM and as a result fuel RISC-V research / growth? Definitely, just like any other major corporate acquisition. We'll see what Nvidia does, but something like this UK Trade Union thing might be able to revert the deal. In which case, RISC-V seems like even more of a long shot.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 16 2020, @10:26PM (2 children)
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V [wikipedia.org]
Isn't out-of-order processing what got Intel into so much trouble with the Specture / Meltdown vulnerabilities?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday September 16 2020, @11:35PM
Congratulation, you just discovered the proof that RISC-V is not a just pipe dream, but one of its implementation is already a reality (instruction pipe) nightmare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2020, @12:43AM
Spectre is branch prediction. Meltdown is out-of-order memory accesses bypassing security checks. As AMD didn't have Meltdown issues, the out-of-order processing isn't necessarily in and of itself problematic.