6 ms·

NUVIA: New Server CPU Startup Going After Intel and AMD

98 points by l31g 7y ago

dddw 7y ago
ok, let's see what they bring to the table
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mkj 7y ago
Clever name, simultaneously looking like NVIDIA but sounding like Via resurrected.
- kube-system 7y ago
  Via still exists. Maybe they could have gone with Nucyrix? Although that kind of sounds like a prescription drug.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    I think Via owns all the IP for Cyrix. If there's no partnership here, I wonder if VIA is going to hit them with a trademark dispute.
- boardwaalk 7y ago
  It just reminds me of a female contraceptive device.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  I saw the VIA in there. Didn't make the connection to nVidia. It felt like it invoked VIA and NUMA. It made me wonder if it was a VIA spinoff; maybe licensing some of the interdependently developed x86_64 IP they bought with Cyrix from the entire Via C6 era.
neftaly 7y ago
Someday someone is gonna make a bunch of money selling CPUs implementing a WASM VM ("death of javascript") and/or lambda calc (Reduceron) in hardware.
- _nhynes 7y ago
  Wasm itself doesn’t have any environment functions that would allow things like managing page tables or networking. I think that what you might see is a RISC-V JIT with a ring-0 Wasm runtime compiled to native. Kind of like https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet, probably
  - neftaly 7y ago
    Oh there's still a lot of work to do before it's possible, but things like WASM pthreads, gc, etc are moving along.
  - FullyFunctional 7y ago
    The interesting thing about WASM is that it's an amazing representation[1] to translate from; certainly much more attractive than binary translation from a legacy ISA (maintaining the illusion of the original ISA carry a substantial tax). As thus, it allows you freedom to innovate something radically different, like TRIPS/EDGE radical. I'd much rather translate from that than create the compiler backend and the entire toolchain. [1] It's not perfect alas, as there are still many things the compiler knows that is lost in translation, such as the complete static alias sets of memory operations, true range limits on values, etc. For some of this we burn power today trying to (re-) discover at run-time (like the memory disambiguator).
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  We really are just reinventing Java, aren't we? (Perhaps better, with hindsight) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor
  - henry_bone 7y ago
CalChris 7y ago
Well, NUVIA has to first design something with a competitive advantage over Intel's chips, then they have to manufacture it and then they have to sell it. Those are three separate and hard problems. With the first problem, they can simplify things considerably by paying an ARM tax. The RISC-V tax is less ($0) but then it offers them less as well. If they design their own ISA, well, good luck with that. Also, clouds like tweaks, so one size won't fit all. With the second problem, there's fab space to be had for sufficient coin. But there's more to manufacturing than filling out a webform and sending a tape with a check. If they can get past the first two hurdles and actually deliver silicon which is significantly better than Intel's then marketing to the big clouds should be the least problematic. Gonna take some money and time. Gulati left Google in March.
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  This is why I think they plan to develop some patentable IP, and get acqui-hired in the end. Its just too daunting a task to get to real silicon for a startup, given the costs of 7nm.
  - CalChris 7y ago
    An alternative would be to take a major cloud on as an investor+customer. If they can deliver a truly cloud worthy CPU, it will have a market and especially if a major cloud is already a customer. This investor+customer approach has a history. Yahoo did this with Google (search) and Apple did this with Adobe (laser printers).
    - MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
      How different is a "cloud worthy" CPU from a regular server CPU? And if there is a difference, is it big enough worth spending 270M $ on it? Double that for 3nm? Maybe! I honestly don't know, but I would suspect AMD and Intel are already hard at work figuring out what the cloud vendors like. If they could shed historical ballast that the established vendors cannot get rid of due to compatibility constraints, it would make sense. But they need to be compatible x86 or ARM (maybe RISC-V) anyway, or else you're talking about boiling the ocean.
shmerl 7y ago
Would be interesting if they'll develop totally new micro architecture and ISA from scratch.
m0zg 7y ago
I really hope this is a RISC-V play of some sort. Otherwise I don't see how they can win. Apple does better ARM than anyone. Given the level of investment, nobody is going to out-Apple Apple in this area. Beefy, cheap, power efficient, legacy-free RISC-V, now that's something I'd be interested in.
- detaro 7y ago
  Doesn't really matter to the server market what Apple is doing unless they start selling it.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    That's true. But there are other strong competitors if you want to ship ARM into the datacenter. And crucially they are already selling to the likes of AWS, where you can go right now and spin up an ARM instance using their products. It's incredibly difficult to get something like AWS to depend on a product by a startup which could go out of business tomorrow.
djsumdog 7y ago
I feel like to succeed here, you need to make an offering that can immediately run either a mainline Linux kernel or a totally open fork (with the intent of getting committed to mainline) and making sure all the major toolchains can build and run on it. Unless there's a minimum friction to migrate, most companies won't make the effort even if they can save a few $100 per server. It takes me back to Intel's VLIW attempt with Itanium/EPIC. Even when they got compilers up to snuff, too many high end tasks (video encoding) either required special instructions or were written in assembly that couldn't easily be ported to EPIC instructions.
justicezyx 7y ago
This is mostly hype, but I am guessing they will adopt an accelerator approach for modern server computing in a data center. There are a few canonical computing pattern inside modern data center: Data crunching Fungible is already on that Distributed services a lot of fan in and fan out some kind of chips that can combine IO networking and moderate general computing instructions can be useful Massive code data storage Catching servers? Overall, I see no reason to take AMD Intel heads on... It's not necessarily anyway, no one needs a third x86 player. We want to have true architecture disruptor...
rolltiide 7y ago
Ugh that name Nybody want to NUke them from high orbit?
wademealing 7y ago
I have a feeling that its a CPU designed with side-channel attacks in mind. Could be Intel, could be ARM.

98 points by l31g 7y ago

dddw 7y ago

ok, let's see what they bring to the table

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mkj 7y ago

Clever name, simultaneously looking like NVIDIA but sounding like Via resurrected.

kube-system 7y ago
Via still exists. Maybe they could have gone with Nucyrix? Although that kind of sounds like a prescription drug.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  I think Via owns all the IP for Cyrix. If there's no partnership here, I wonder if VIA is going to hit them with a trademark dispute.
boardwaalk 7y ago
It just reminds me of a female contraceptive device.
djsumdog 7y ago
I saw the VIA in there. Didn't make the connection to nVidia. It felt like it invoked VIA and NUMA. It made me wonder if it was a VIA spinoff; maybe licensing some of the interdependently developed x86_64 IP they bought with Cyrix from the entire Via C6 era.

neftaly 7y ago

Someday someone is gonna make a bunch of money selling CPUs implementing a WASM VM ("death of javascript") and/or lambda calc (Reduceron) in hardware.

_nhynes 7y ago
Wasm itself doesn’t have any environment functions that would allow things like managing page tables or networking. I think that what you might see is a RISC-V JIT with a ring-0 Wasm runtime compiled to native. Kind of like https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet, probably
- neftaly 7y ago
  Oh there's still a lot of work to do before it's possible, but things like WASM pthreads, gc, etc are moving along.
- FullyFunctional 7y ago
  The interesting thing about WASM is that it's an amazing representation[1] to translate from; certainly much more attractive than binary translation from a legacy ISA (maintaining the illusion of the original ISA carry a substantial tax). As thus, it allows you freedom to innovate something radically different, like TRIPS/EDGE radical. I'd much rather translate from that than create the compiler backend and the entire toolchain. [1] It's not perfect alas, as there are still many things the compiler knows that is lost in translation, such as the complete static alias sets of memory operations, true range limits on values, etc. For some of this we burn power today trying to (re-) discover at run-time (like the memory disambiguator).
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
We really are just reinventing Java, aren't we? (Perhaps better, with hindsight) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor
- henry_bone 7y ago

CalChris 7y ago

Well, NUVIA has to first design something with a competitive advantage over Intel's chips, then they have to manufacture it and then they have to sell it. Those are three separate and hard problems. With the first problem, they can simplify things considerably by paying an ARM tax. The RISC-V tax is less ($0) but then it offers them less as well. If they design their own ISA, well, good luck with that. Also, clouds like tweaks, so one size won't fit all. With the second problem, there's fab space to be had for sufficient coin. But there's more to manufacturing than filling out a webform and sending a tape with a check. If they can get past the first two hurdles and actually deliver silicon which is significantly better than Intel's then marketing to the big clouds should be the least problematic. Gonna take some money and time. Gulati left Google in March.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
This is why I think they plan to develop some patentable IP, and get acqui-hired in the end. Its just too daunting a task to get to real silicon for a startup, given the costs of 7nm.
- CalChris 7y ago
  An alternative would be to take a major cloud on as an investor+customer. If they can deliver a truly cloud worthy CPU, it will have a market and especially if a major cloud is already a customer. This investor+customer approach has a history. Yahoo did this with Google (search) and Apple did this with Adobe (laser printers).
  - MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
    How different is a "cloud worthy" CPU from a regular server CPU? And if there is a difference, is it big enough worth spending 270M $ on it? Double that for 3nm? Maybe! I honestly don't know, but I would suspect AMD and Intel are already hard at work figuring out what the cloud vendors like. If they could shed historical ballast that the established vendors cannot get rid of due to compatibility constraints, it would make sense. But they need to be compatible x86 or ARM (maybe RISC-V) anyway, or else you're talking about boiling the ocean.

shmerl 7y ago

Would be interesting if they'll develop totally new micro architecture and ISA from scratch.

m0zg 7y ago

I really hope this is a RISC-V play of some sort. Otherwise I don't see how they can win. Apple does better ARM than anyone. Given the level of investment, nobody is going to out-Apple Apple in this area. Beefy, cheap, power efficient, legacy-free RISC-V, now that's something I'd be interested in.

detaro 7y ago
Doesn't really matter to the server market what Apple is doing unless they start selling it.
- m0zg 7y ago
  That's true. But there are other strong competitors if you want to ship ARM into the datacenter. And crucially they are already selling to the likes of AWS, where you can go right now and spin up an ARM instance using their products. It's incredibly difficult to get something like AWS to depend on a product by a startup which could go out of business tomorrow.

djsumdog 7y ago

I feel like to succeed here, you need to make an offering that can immediately run either a mainline Linux kernel or a totally open fork (with the intent of getting committed to mainline) and making sure all the major toolchains can build and run on it. Unless there's a minimum friction to migrate, most companies won't make the effort even if they can save a few $100 per server. It takes me back to Intel's VLIW attempt with Itanium/EPIC. Even when they got compilers up to snuff, too many high end tasks (video encoding) either required special instructions or were written in assembly that couldn't easily be ported to EPIC instructions.

justicezyx 7y ago

This is mostly hype, but I am guessing they will adopt an accelerator approach for modern server computing in a data center. There are a few canonical computing pattern inside modern data center: Data crunching Fungible is already on that Distributed services a lot of fan in and fan out some kind of chips that can combine IO networking and moderate general computing instructions can be useful Massive code data storage Catching servers? Overall, I see no reason to take AMD Intel heads on... It's not necessarily anyway, no one needs a third x86 player. We want to have true architecture disruptor...

rolltiide 7y ago

Ugh that name Nybody want to NUke them from high orbit?

wademealing 7y ago

I have a feeling that its a CPU designed with side-channel attacks in mind. Could be Intel, could be ARM.