5 ms·

Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

57 points by Katydid 7y ago

Symmetry 7y ago
Given that they're trying to push their Tegra platform for automotive and robotic uses I'd hope so.
jamesfmilne 7y ago
They own Mellanox now, and they have their own ARM core. I could imagine them coming out with a Network GPU that has nothing but 100GbE/200GbE and power. The ARM core doesn't have to be super-fast if it's just setting up RDMA transfers, of data and command buffers.
rbirkby 7y ago
“There are no GPUs in this system because there are no European makers of GPUs” Cough cough. Mali. Imagination. Even Apple.
- ksec 7y ago
  Well, I guess they count Mali ( ARM ) and IMG as UK and not EU ?
  - polotics 7y ago
    Last I checked, Europe is a continent, not a bureaucracy.
_bxg1 7y ago
Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.
- yep_thats_right 7y ago
  I'm also curious how fellow HNers think x86 will fare in the next 10, 20, 30 years. Will we still be using x86 as the most common option in laptops by then?
  - penagwin 7y ago
    x86 will be around in some form for at least 25+ years as legacy programs require it. Microsoft has played with x86 emulation on ARM, and they've had an ARM build on windows for years now. We're sorta moving in the ARM direction for certain applications, budget laptops already are flirting with arm to varying success. I think what we'll see is better compiler/tooling support for cross-compilation for modern programs, and a slow movement towards ARM as it matures in performance/cost.
  - blu42 7y ago
    FWIW, all my laptops are currently arm-based (chromebooks), for the simple reason of price + battery performance.
- gumby 7y ago
  In many cases dramatically so (and I say this as someone who doesn't even like x86 much). It depends on your application. For small embedded applications where things like BOM or electrical power massively dominate, neither x86 or ARM is worth it (and this is in a world where you can get a small ARM for less than a dollar -- we're talking about CPUs that cost pennies in volume). For pretty much every "mobile" application (where "mobile" includes not just phones and tablets but TVs, IoT etc) ARM is the majority. Intel BTW had several opportunities to dominate this with non-x86 devices and screwed all of them up. But for desktop and especially server machines, the two x86 vendors really crush the alternatives (until a couple of months ago I would have said "Intel" rather than "x86 vendors, but AMD is really really hot). They've spent decades going after an architectural point with lots of fast IO lanes, huge caches, lots of micro architectural units, and the result is machines that can get a lot of data in and out quickly and operate on a lot of it at once. Basically they are designed for large sustained workloads. That's an interesting place to be financially, but it's a proportionately decreasing share of the computation market. It's great to see that ARM-based machines have made strides in supercomputing but those workloads are quite specialized so you can't really learn much of anything from that. I do believe long term that's also a market where x86's complexity will work against it since supercomputing workloads are typically architected around the machine they will be run upon.
pilooch 7y ago
"The beauty of Arm is that it is open. You can you can add all sorts of interesting technologies that will be beneficial to supercomputing, such as being tightly integrated. By marrying an Arm CPU with a Tesla GPU...". The essence of it. NVidia is so close that it makes development very painful. At the moment it's the required path for deep learning, but hopefully it'll change a bit.

57 points by Katydid 7y ago

Given that they're trying to push their Tegra platform for automotive and robotic uses I'd hope so.

They own Mellanox now, and they have their own ARM core. I could imagine them coming out with a Network GPU that has nothing but 100GbE/200GbE and power. The ARM core doesn't have to be super-fast if it's just setting up RDMA transfers, of data and command buffers.

rbirkby 7y ago

“There are no GPUs in this system because there are no European makers of GPUs” Cough cough. Mali. Imagination. Even Apple.

ksec 7y ago
Well, I guess they count Mali ( ARM ) and IMG as UK and not EU ?
- polotics 7y ago
  Last I checked, Europe is a continent, not a bureaucracy.

_bxg1 7y ago

Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.

yep_thats_right 7y ago
I'm also curious how fellow HNers think x86 will fare in the next 10, 20, 30 years. Will we still be using x86 as the most common option in laptops by then?
- penagwin 7y ago
  x86 will be around in some form for at least 25+ years as legacy programs require it. Microsoft has played with x86 emulation on ARM, and they've had an ARM build on windows for years now. We're sorta moving in the ARM direction for certain applications, budget laptops already are flirting with arm to varying success. I think what we'll see is better compiler/tooling support for cross-compilation for modern programs, and a slow movement towards ARM as it matures in performance/cost.
- blu42 7y ago
  FWIW, all my laptops are currently arm-based (chromebooks), for the simple reason of price + battery performance.
gumby 7y ago
In many cases dramatically so (and I say this as someone who doesn't even like x86 much). It depends on your application. For small embedded applications where things like BOM or electrical power massively dominate, neither x86 or ARM is worth it (and this is in a world where you can get a small ARM for less than a dollar -- we're talking about CPUs that cost pennies in volume). For pretty much every "mobile" application (where "mobile" includes not just phones and tablets but TVs, IoT etc) ARM is the majority. Intel BTW had several opportunities to dominate this with non-x86 devices and screwed all of them up. But for desktop and especially server machines, the two x86 vendors really crush the alternatives (until a couple of months ago I would have said "Intel" rather than "x86 vendors, but AMD is really really hot). They've spent decades going after an architectural point with lots of fast IO lanes, huge caches, lots of micro architectural units, and the result is machines that can get a lot of data in and out quickly and operate on a lot of it at once. Basically they are designed for large sustained workloads. That's an interesting place to be financially, but it's a proportionately decreasing share of the computation market. It's great to see that ARM-based machines have made strides in supercomputing but those workloads are quite specialized so you can't really learn much of anything from that. I do believe long term that's also a market where x86's complexity will work against it since supercomputing workloads are typically architected around the machine they will be run upon.

pilooch 7y ago

"The beauty of Arm is that it is open. You can you can add all sorts of interesting technologies that will be beneficial to supercomputing, such as being tightly integrated. By marrying an Arm CPU with a Tesla GPU...". The essence of it. NVidia is so close that it makes development very painful. At the moment it's the required path for deep learning, but hopefully it'll change a bit.