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Nvidia announces Project Denver ARM CPU for the desktop
- sliverstorm 16y agoMan, I wish I was working for them, but I haven't even graduated yet. It'd be really cool to be involved with this stuff.
- potatolicious 16y agoKeep your grades up. When I was in college NVidia had, emblazoned in bold text across their intern ads, that a minimum 80%+ was required for consideration. Part of the reason I never bothered with them - IMHO a company who heavily bases their hiring choices on school grades is not someone I want to work for. It betrays a belief in bad/unreliable indicators/metrics.
- jamesaguilar 16y agoIt betrays a desire to avoid a large chunk of bad candidates while discarding only a few good ones.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoNot everyone has the time to do well in college even if they have the ability. I worked 30-35 hours a week every week in college. I can guarantee that I would have gotten a 3.9 or 4.0 had I been able to not work, but I didn't have that luxury. Oh well, I got out with a 3.2 which seemed good to me.
- jamesaguilar 16y agoI agree, but my point stands that most of the people getting bad grades probably deserve them despite the few who deserve better. Companies who want to make the best use of their limited hiring resources would be served by avoiding people with low GPAs.
- krschultz 16y agoEven with a 3.2, you probably beat most kids at an engineering school. Although I've heard of engineering schools where half the class has a 3.5, but at my school our top guy had a 3.8, nobody had a 3.9 or 4.0 no matter how hard they tried. I was in the top 20% with a 3.3
- endtime 16y agoWhich school, if you don't mind my asking?
- vessenes 16y agoIf I were you, when applying for jobs, I would state you worked full time while in school. I'd definitely take a second look at a mid-GPA candidate who had an awesome work ethic like that.
- brianmckenzie 16y agoVery good point. I was in much the same boat as the OP. There is a lot of respect out there for people who've worked their way through school. Be careful not to emphasize it too much though, lest it seem like you're making excuses. Maybe the person considering you for a job did the same thing.
- Keyframe 16y agoAlso, not everyone has the luxury to go to college at all.
- potatolicious 16y agoNot my experience in college at all. The bad hackers were the ones at the extreme ends of the scales - the borderline-failing ones were expectedly terrible, and the top-marks usually had some other major handicaps that made them remarkable people but terrible colleagues (extreme lack of team work ability, zero communication skills, tactlessness, gigantic egotism, etc etc). The best hackers (rather, the ones you'd want to work with) tended to fall in the middle of the pack. Decent marks, not great. Didn't spend their days trying to ace the next exam and spent a lot of time hacking on cool projects instead. My own experience in college is that marks in the middle of the pack made the best employees, and in fact nowadays an extremely high GPA is a yellow flag when I'm reviewing resumes (though obviously, not a disqualifier at all). Keep in mind at this school 80%+ would put you in the top 10-15% of all marks. I'm not against filtering for low marks, but in this case NVidia set their sights on the top 10-15% of the student population and disqualified everyone else as a matter of course. IMHO a dumb move that unnecessarily turned away a lot of qualified people.
- peregrine 16y agoJust wanted to chime in and say I am having the same experience.
- krschultz 16y agoWe're not really talking about hackers here though. To me a hacker is ripping through code getting it done. But that works better in the software world where it is relatively easy to make a mistake. I don't work at Nvidia, but working in the hardware field things go a bit slower. You need people who pay attention to detail and follow the process to a T to avoid costly mistakes and rework. Thats why "people who could put up with the bullshit that it took to get into the top 15%" and "people who are intelligent enough to design chips at a high level and disciplined to follow the process to avoid blowing hundreds of thousands of a dollars per mistake" have more cross over than high GPA and good ruby on rails hacker. It is just a different mindset and a different set of economics to be building slow iterating hardware vs quick iterating software.
- potatolicious 16y ago
- endtime 16y agoA friend of a friend was asked to implement sqrt in hardware during a phone interview with nVidia. If you're smart enough to do that and you can't maintain the equivalent of a 2.7 GPA then that betrays a poor work ethic.
- boredguy8 16y agoOr far more interesting questions abound than the ones in your "Communications 101" class. (Also, top 80%+ isn't the same thing as a 2.7 GPA - completely different systems.)
- krschultz 16y agoDo you mean top 20%? Because the top 80% is well, almost everyone. Or the 80th percentile would be the top 20%. I'm not nitpicking, I just took the 80% to mean 2.7 as well.
- endtime 16y agoHe didn't say top 80%, he just said 80%, which I took to mean an average score of 80%.
- endtime 16y agoAlso, "this class isn't interesting so I'm going to badly in it and screw up my GPA" is a pretty immature and foolish attitude.
- Symmetry 16y agoI think their interview's might be a little uneven. I was asked how to swap the values of two registers in hardware and I said something about muxes and lines. When the interviewer sounded skeptical I started expounding on different types of latches and their properties. In retrospect I think they wanted the xor trick, but that's really a firmware or software thing. Needless to say I didn't get the real interview.
- bryanlarsen 16y agoNah, it just means that they get a large number of applicants. If I had to WAG, it means they'd filter out about 50% of the good programmers and 90% of the bad ones. I also believe that grades correspond better with ability in chip design then it does in programming. (I've actually done both. Chip design is fun, but I'm addicted to very short code-compile-test cycles.)
- whakojacko 16y agoAlso remember that most companies arent willing to spend nearly as much recruiting effort per candidate for interns, and understandably so. I interned at NVIDIA a few summers back (although in software not hardware) and the university recruiter said that they more or less don't consider applicants with less than 3.5GPAs for internships. At my school, probably 80% of the people I knew and considered to be "good" programmers had above that, so I think its a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
- joeyo 16y agoIt likely just means that they prefer to have many false negatives (rejecting good employees) and reduce the number of false positives (accepting poor employees). If the size of their applicant pool is high, that's a trade-off they can afford to make.
- tmurray 16y agoWork on interesting projects, be active in the appropriate communities--that gets you noticed. Grades aren't everything.
- potatolicious 16y agoThat was my MO during college, and it seems to have worked pretty well for me ;) Some companies though, will refuse to look at a resume, regardless of how richly experienced it may be, simply based on the fact that you failed to hit an arbitrary bar during college. To me this is lunacy.
- tmurray 16y agoThat's exactly what I did, and I work at NVIDIA. What a company says at career fairs is not necessarily applicable to everyone.
- potatolicious 16y agoIn this case, perhaps this issue should be raised internally at NVidia. I for one didn't even bother applying, since having interned at companies that filtered strongly by grades, this was a major red flag. Candidates with significant work experience - even ones still in college - are in high demand everywhere and have a lot of choices. Even a non-ninja-rockstar-guru like me had internship offers piling up outside the door. In this case it would benefit the company to not put things into job ads that don't actually matter.
- ssmoot 16y agoNo offense, but I'm going to be blunt: If you were putting yourself through college, paying as you go, then as long as you managed a low "B" I'll probably cut you a break. You'll get a fair shot. If you decide to skip college and throw yourself into work, I'm not going to hold it against you. That being my background, I generally see it as a plus. If you went to college on someone else's dime, your parent's or the bank's, and have such a weak work ethic you couldn't be bothered to apply yourself then odds are you aren't going to bring anything special to the table at the work-place. I'm sure there are a lot of cases where it's not fair, but there's few things that annoy me more than an inflated sense of entitlement, and for good reason. In my experience it's a great indicator of a poor performing employee. Generally with drama, generally thinking a lot of themselves despite negligible contributions to the business.
- jarek 16y agoIncidentally, I interned at nv and my cumulative average at the time of applying was somewhere in the high 60s. Don't believe everything it says on the box ;) (I was a software intern, but the job I had applied to asked for 80% as well.)
- psykotic 16y ago> Part of the reason I never bothered with them - IMHO a company who heavily bases their hiring choices on school grades is not someone I want to work for. I worked for NVIDIA in a key group on key projects, and I never even finished my university degree (though my grades were very good). To make a general and hopefully obvious statement, if you're hiring someone fresh out of school with a bachelor's degree but no real-world accomplishments, you have to judge them by some objective measure, and grades are part of that. If you're dealing with someone with real-world accomplishments, it's a completely different matter. When interviewing people during my time there, I personally never so much as glanced at their GPAs. But then again our group generally only hired people who had (and would soon have) Ph.D. degrees or experienced hackers whose past work spoke for itself. I imagine if you're hiring for entry-level positions, you need a very different approach just for the first round of culling due to the sheer volume of applicants.
- eventhough 16y agoI used to work at NVIDIA as a hardware engineer and would go to nearby university career fairs to recruit new college grads. There's no absolute rule regarding GPA but generally 3.5 was the minimum cut off. NVIDIA was also the only company I knew of that required candidates to take a written exam on the spot at the career fair. Scary stuff. The problem is there are too many applicants to look at so any kind of filter (administered fairly) is better than none at all.
- wlievens 16y agoI actually worked for ARM, but not on their main architecture. I worked for a satelite office acquired a few years earlier, which was spun out again last year. The project was a dynamically retargettable compiler for DSPs.
- coryrc 16y agoI used to think the alternative-CPU-taking-over-the-desktop would be cool. In P4 days of 120W+ processors, ARM looked like a savior. But now, the only difference would be who is pocketing the $50-100 I'd spend on a new processor.
- alimoeeny 16y agoStrong competition is (almost) always good, at least for the consumers.
- rbanffy 16y agoThat and the x86 ISA is utterly disgusting.
- colanderman 16y agoI doubt nVidia will be competing against x86 but rather x86-64, which has many of the "legacy" features you're no doubt thinking of (e.g. segment registers) removed or sequestered.
- RomP 16y agoneverthelss the instruction set and especially encoding of the newer instructions is a nightmare. I wonder what ARM has to say about 64-bit computing, though
- leoc 16y ago> I wonder what ARM has to say about 64-bit computing, though Bad news on that one, at least for the first generation of nVidia chips based on the Cortex-A15. Segmented address spaces? They're baa-aack!
- rbanffy 16y ago64-bit is a big deal on x86 because with it came a couple extra registers and a better architecture overall. On modern machines, 64 bits usually only means more addresses, because they have plenty registers already. I remember that back when the 64-bit UNIX was introduced in, IIRC, SGI machines. Nobody made a big deal of it. SGIs were already very impressive and nobody cared that much for the extra bits in registers.
- matthew-wegner 16y agoAnd Microsoft just announced ARM support in Windows 8...
- commandar 16y agoI think it's also interesting if taken into the context that a lot of the Nvidia-Intel feud stems around Nvidia's development of an x86 CPU that had to be shelved due to Intel patents. The chipset licensing disputes, etc, seem to all stem from Intel being upset about Nvidia attempting to encroach on their turf. It makes me wonder if Nvidia was lobbying Microsoft to expand Windows support beyond x86 as a direct result of all this. Either way, Nvidia's pretty clearly wanted to expand into the desktop CPU market for a while now, and with Intel blocking their entrance to the x86 market, it only makes sense they'd start examining other options. ARM seems like a pretty logical place for them to end up given the options.
- leoc 16y ago> Nvidia's pretty clearly wanted to expand into the desktop CPU market for a while now While trying to just hold position as a supplier of GPUs for x86 PCs would be very difficult for nVidia now that both of the big x86 CPU manufacturers are pushing their own GPU systems hard (and increasingly, integrating them in the CPU). This is probably quite an up-or-out situation for them.
- sliverstorm 16y agoOr, what if they just need to expand to be able to afford continuing the development of cutting-edge graphics? The profit margins must be getting thinner.
- coryrc 16y agoThey also announced a database filesystem for Windows ... 6? Maybe earlier?
- leoc 16y ago
- iwwr 16y agoAre there particular advantages to an ARM CPU on a desktop machine? Assuming software compatibility is not an issue.
- msbarnett 16y agoPower draw. The advantages there would be cooling noise, lower electricity bills and the like. Whether or not you find that compelling or not is another issue.
- RomP 16y agolower power per instruction is the number one advantage here. Lowering power consumption means not only lower power/cooling bills, it also means better scalability in frequency domain, since speed of today's x86/x64 CPUs are limited by the cooling system's capability to evacuate heat (evenly) from the chip. IOW, it means temporal restoration of the MHz race, while starting number-of-cores race.
- blinkingled 16y agoVery hard to see ARM advantage on mid/high end desktops. Where Intel is with Sandy Bridge - it will be a long time before ARM reaches that performance. And then low cost, lower performance desktops - why would anyone make one when laptops are more convenient? I fail to see the point of ARM on "desktop" - Server yes (power consumption), Laptops yes (battery life, form factor) - but desktop?
- faragon 16y agoIt's about the cost: 2GB RAM, 2-core 2GHz ARM CPU, GPU, 160GB hard disk, for just 100 US$. Add another 100 US$ for a case, keyboard, mouse and a cheap monitor... the whole desktop computer for just 200 US$ (!)
- blinkingled 16y agoObviously. But people need performance on the desktop. With cheap AMD / Intel QC CPUs do you think ARM will offer better performance at significantly lower cost than AMD/Intel? I doubt it. And just cost is not going to play well in the desktop market. EDIT : At that configuration, without a monitor, when desktop sales are all time low compared to laptops in the PC market - why wouldn't one just buy a AMD Fusion Netbook?
- jcl 16y agoKind of amusing, considering that the ARM architecture was originally created for desktop computers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History
- rythie 16y agoI remember we had these in Acorn machines, when I was at school in the 90s (in the U.K.). They were always very fast I remember. They were replaced with PCs later on, but due to the budget the school was on, these ending up being much slower at the time but that was most likely due to Windows needing a lot more memory than RISC OS did.
- megablast 16y agoThey were fast, but they were not necessarily faster than x86 machines. They were RISC compared to CISC(old x86), so hard to compare them directly.
- rythie 16y agoI'm pretty sure it was to do with the RISC OS being lightweight memory wise than anything. I had some good spec'ed PCs at that time but those relatively cheap Acorn machines were always faster in basic OS tasks.
- regularfry 16y agoAs far as I recall, at least part of that was down to hardware acceleration. They were still awesome machines, though. Fantastic for learning assembler on.
- nitrogen 16y agoARM did originally stand for Acorn RISC Machine, so it makes perfect sense that your Acorn machines had ARM processors :).
- Charuru 16y agoThis makes sense in the era of webapps and python and java. If people were still reliant on programs explicitly written for x86 this would never go anywhere.
- zhyder 16y agoBlog post from Nvidia: http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/01/project-denver-processor-to-usher-in-new-era-of-computing/ http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/01/project-denver-processor-to-...
- wmf 16y agoWow, Bill Dally is still having the RISC vs. CISC discussion. That's daring; most computer architects consider it a settled issue.
- miloshasan 16y agoThe article does not contain the word "CISC"...
- wmf 16y ago"variable-length instructions, ... a larger area for instruction decoding" == CISC
- miloshasan 16y agoAh, OK... I thought he was comparing more "CPU-like" to "GPU-like" designs, rather than CISC to RISC.
- wtallis 16y agoWhich way do you think the issue was settled? Last time I read much about the issue, there seemed to be decent arguments both ways: CISC allows denser packing of instructions, but all CPUs are RISC internally, but the CISC decoders are negligible overhead, but good compilers are easier to write for RISC, ... How valid are the various arguments these days? The compiler complexity argument seems to work well against the Itanium, but I'm not sure that it makes much difference between ARM and x86 or x86_64. The instruction decoders on an x86 processor really do look minor on paper, but why hasn't Intel been able to produce a chip with competitive performance per watt, especially given their fab advantage? It seemed like they were really trying with the Atom, but it still hasn't gotten down to the power levels where ARM really shines, even though the high-end ARM cores are now out-of-order superscalar designs.
- cyrus_ 16y agoThis is a big win for nVidia on the supercomputer side of things. They will soon have to face integrated CPU-GPU solutions from Intel and AMD which greatly simplify the process of building and programming a supercomputer. They've just one-upped them both by creating a similar offering with better performance on the GPU side (where the FLOPS are) and better power efficiency on the CPU side. In the race to the exaflop, nVidia just changed the odds dramatically.
- jdavid 16y agoRisc is good. ;-) The power of that p6 chip is too much for you. nvidia congrats, this has been a long time coming. if feel like nvidia is tron in this case and intel is the mpc, fight for the user. it's time to embrace massive parallelism. this will change everything. I am really excited and happy to be a shareholder of nvidia now.