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Nvidia’s Integration Dreams
- wffurr 6y agoHard to wrap my mind around what a "data center software platform" means in practice. Isn't that covered by things like AWS and Azure?
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoGo down a layer or two. What platform do you want for the actual hardware in a data center that is a part of AWS or Azure?
- ramses0 6y agoOwn NVidia GPU's. Own ARM chips. Connect ARM chips to NVidia GPU's in big racks of racks connected to power. ARM is effectively embarrassingly parallel, low-power compute, and GPU's are parallel high-power compute. If NVidia got into datacenter design (with ARM+GPU), dropped K8S+S3+Postgres onto it, charged $1999.95/mo for access, what could they deliver to customers? What would a vertically integrated datacenter look like where you are the designer + manufacturer for everything from the concrete up?
- paulmd 6y ago> What would a vertically integrated datacenter look like where you are the designer + manufacturer for everything from the concrete up? A lot like AWS, Oracle Cloud, and soon to be Google Cloud and Azure? people are losing their shit but this isn't even that novel lol, quite a few other players already own their full stack.
- pathseeker 6y agoNone of those companies make their CPUs or GPUs.
- Keyframe 6y agoAWS Graviton, although an arm.. Google TPU and affinity for experiments like with POWER.. microsoft hiring people with custom cpu/soc experience (and they have experience with sq1/snapdragon)
- cavisne 6y agoI read it as a software platform for programming in a data centre with nvidia's stack. Ie a library thats optimized to drive a bunch of hosts with ARM cores, strapped to nvidia gpu's, connected by mellanox interconnects. Sell it a a unit to the public clouds for a massive markup, or maybe offer on their own cloud for an unbeatably low cost.
- klelatti 6y agoMy guess would be tight software integration between Nvidia Arm CPUs and Nvidia GPUs that would not be available to other Arm vendors or users of Nvidia GPUs with Intel CPUs. CUDA provides software lock-in to Nvidia GPUs. This would provide software lock in to the combined Nvidia Arm / Nvidia GPU platform.
- sameersegal 6y ago“Owning it all ... from cloud to edge” is an exciting ambition not only for Nvidia but also as a developer and a consumer. It’s going to be hard to pull it off, of course, but it’s worth a shot. EDIT - explaining the benefits for developers, and therefore consumers. A "cloud to edge" stack from hardware to the application layer could create new application patterns that can tremendously accelerate autonomous driving, everyday robots, gaming. It could democratize this for small (maybe indie) developer teams. Wouldn't this have a great impact on consumers?
- throwaway2048 6y agoThe idea of a company "owning it all" does not sound like something that I am going to benefit from as a consumer long term.
- redisman 6y agoDon’t forget their competitors in the space are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They won’t be able to do more than make a dent to that market share.
- geogra4 6y agoYes, but owning the IP that runs Amazon CPUs gives them a clear advantage?
- Ericson2314 6y agoIf you are licensing the ISA but have your own implementation design, pivoting to RISC-V should be easy.
- justicezyx 6y agoMarket calls for competition...
- leptoniscool 6y agoI'm no fan of Apple, but they now own everything from chips and hardware to the OS and 30% of app store revenue, and they are the most valuable company on Earth.
- cinntaile 6y ago"I don’t know if it will work; data centers are about the density of processing power, which is related to but still different than performance-per-watt, ARM’s traditional advantage relative to Intel, and there are a huge amount of 3rd-parties involved in such a transition." But isn't performance-per-watt starting to become more important than the density of processing power which is limited by your power consumption? They have been buying some other data center/HPC companies as well this year like Mellanox and Cumulus, to me it almost seems like they want to own the entire data center stack and eventually provide a similar offering as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
- MikeCapone 6y agoThey'd rather sell the picks & shovels to AWS, Azure and GCP.
- Macha 6y agoIsn't this more selling the ore to the pick and shovel makers? The hapless gold miners in this case being all the Uber for street sweeper startups
- nitrogen 6y agoTotally OT I know, but Uber for street sweeper -- I want this. Give me an app to request a quick cleanup and maybe try to get my neighbors to chip in. Or to report roadway debris to the city. Or for driveway snow removal during the winter.
- cinntaile 6y agoYour city might have an app for reporting issues to the city. https://www.sandiego.gov/get-it-done https://www.sandiego.gov/get-it-done has it for example.
- newsclues 6y agoWill they buy micron or another major memory company?
- mtgx 6y agoThat might piss off Samsung, just about the only good partner Nvidia has left.
- discodave 6y agoThe comments about edge, and combining Nvidia / graphics tech with Arm makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect that's where most of the value of this merger will come from. When it comes to Arm in the datacenter, my question is: How do they actually plan to extract money from ARM displacing x86? AWS has been deploying at least one ARM chip (Annapurna/Nitro) on every single EC2 server for 5+ years. Surely they would have made sure their license ensures future rights to keep using ARM at a reasonable price. Their Graviton instances are effectively just one more ARM chip, so an Intel instance has 2 Arm chips (1 for EBS, 1 for networking) while a Graviton/Arm instance has 3 (EBS, networking, CPU). Unless the Arm license reads something like "If you make a really big multi-core chip we get to charge you more"... how does the x86 -> Arm transition actually move the needle for Arm Holdings / Nvidia?
- freeone3000 6y agoArm licensing of their processor includes a royalty. More processor sales make more money for Arm.
- discodave 6y agoThis estimate has 6 billion Arm chips shipped in Q4 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131983/arm-based-chip-unit-shipments-as-reported-by-licensees-worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131983/arm-based-chip-u... The hyperscale/cloud datacenter market is single-digit millions of CPUs shipped per year. So if the whole cloud went to Arm tomorrow it would be less than 1% of total Arm chip shipments. My point is that unless there's a way to extract higher $ per chip in the datacenter then actually it doesn't make a difference for Arm. Edit: By datacenter market I'm really referring to AWS/GCP/Azure... the rest of the market ain't going en-masse to Arm anytime soon.
- btian 6y agoWhat makes you think ARM charges the same for a Neoverse N1 CPU as a Cortex M0 CPU? That wouldn't make business sense.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI hope this fails miserably. NVidia doubly fucks over desktop Linux with it's proprietary drivers and CUDA beating Khronos Group stuff, and I don't want their abilities to grow.
- Ericson2314 6y agoThe post author is very bullish on commoditization and modularization winning in the end, and points out this would damper or sink NVidia's plans, and I very much hope he is right.
- varbhat 6y agoI think that if Nvidia open sourced it's Graphic Drivers , 80℅ of backslash against Nvidia would disappear suddenly. I think that Backslash against Nvidia is due to it's somewhat hostile nature towards OpenSource (to be accurate, they didn't open source Nvidia's Graphic Drivers). But, Nvidia's drivers work well(Nvidia's Linux drivers are somewhat on parity with Windows ones) . I heard that until AMD open sourced their drivers, lot of them were preaching that Nvidia is only way to Play high end games on Linux(also CUDA). Personally, I prefer AMD GPU. I find their drivers to work great with Linux.
- marcosdumay 6y agoWell, parity with Windows is the right wording here. Windows drivers are starting to work better now that Microsoft adopted the Linux model of centralizing them. But they still aren't any great. For any non-usual hardware the drivers still come bundled with all kinds of shit, stop working after a while, and get bugs at random.
- bayindirh 6y ago> Windows drivers are starting to work better now that Microsoft adopted the Linux model of centralizing them. No. Intel ships WHQL Certified broken WiFi drivers via Windows Update. It took me three weeks to try all available versions, settings etc to troubleshoot. At last, I've roll backed the driver to earliest version and pinned it there. Now the wireless card is working as intended. Device is an HP Spectre X2 convertible tablet so everything is a package. Edit: Use kinder words.
- calvano915 6y agoI've installed Intel's Driver Update Utility and it keeps the wifi up to date from them rather than Windows Update. I remember conflicts with Windows Update when trying to use Intel's own drivers years ago but it hasn't been an issue with my current device.
- bayindirh 6y ago
- pixelpoet 6y ago> The most advanced versions of Nvidia’s just-announced GeForce RTX 30 Series, for example, has an incredible 10,496 cores. I'm so tired of Nvidia getting away with this blatant falsehood. They weren't even actual-cores when Nvidia started counting SIMT lanes as "cores" (how many hands do you have, 2 or 10? And somebody who writes twice as fast as you must obviously have 20 hands, yes?), and now that the cores can, under some conditions, do dual-issue, they are counting each one double. What's next, calling each bit in a SIMT lane a "core"?
- jrockway 6y agoAs a GPU buyer, I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all. They list all their specs as like "X ray tracing cores, Y tensor cores, Z CUDA cores" and I have no idea how that translates to real-world performance. Which of those does my game use? Which of those does Blender use when raytracing? (Those are the two applications that I use a GPU for, so the ones I personally care about.) And the cores are listed as separate things, but I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right? I think it all ends up being useless at best and completely misleading at worse. The reality is that I don't even know if I want to buy their product or not. I guess that's what reviews are for? But why do reviewers have to do the job of Nvidia's marketing department? Seems strange to me.
- llukas 6y agoIs HT/SMT on CPU any different?
- dahart 6y ago> But why do reviewers have to do the job of Nvidia's marketing department? Are you suggesting you would rather read reviews of Nvidia products that are written by Nvidia, and you would trust them more than 3rd party reviews? > I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all. Do read @TomVDBs comments; this isn't Nvidia, this is the industry-wide marketing terminology. Cores are important to developers, so what you're talking about is that some of the marketing is (unsurprisingly) not targeted for you. If you care most about Blender and games, you should definitely seek out the benchmarks for Blender and the games you play. Even if you understood exactly what cores are, that wouldn't change anything here, you would still want to focus on the apps you use and not on the specs, right? > I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right? FWIW, that's a complicated question. There's more going on than just whether these cores are separate things. The short answer is that they are, but there are multiple subsystems that both types of cores have to share, memory being one of the more critical examples. The better answer here is to compare the perf of the applications you care about, using Nvidia cards to using AMD cards, picking the same price point for each. That's how to decide which to buy, not worrying about the internal engineering.
- DCKing 6y agoHuang's first reason why they would take up ARM is really, really interesting (and serves as a big counterpoint for my pessimistic take on the announcement yesterday). > Number one is this: as you know, we would love to take Nvidia’s IP through ARM’s network. Unless we were one company, I think the ability for us to do that and to do that with all of our might, is very challenging. I don’t take other people’s products through my channel! I don’t expose my ecosystem to to other company’s products. The ecosystem is hard-earned — it took 30 years for Arm to get here — and so we have an opportunity to offer that whole network, that vast ecosystem of partners and customers Nvidia’s IP. You can do some simple math and the economics there should be very exciting. If Nvidia truely sees ARM as an opportunity kill off Mali and expand Geforce's install base, they might create an incentive for themselves to keep the ARM ecosystem alive. Note this is a pretty credible take I think - Samsung's next Exynos processor will have Radeon graphics and Nvidia can quickly nip that stuff in the bud by this (assuming Geforce is better and cheaper). If this plays out this way would simply be great for the ARM ecosystem. If Nvidia can sell Geforce like ARM sells Mali and leave the ARM ecosystem truly intact, I don't think many will lament the demise of Mali (although I expect some counterviews for this on HN :) ). Having Geforce be a commanding presence in the ARM ecosystem might be a big problem for the future diversity of GPU vendors though, but that's something I'm interested in seeing play out at least. I do hope AMD can take the battle to Nvidia on ARM too, and that Qualcomm and PowerVR find ways to stay relevant.
- choiway 6y agoCan't Nvidia do this without buying ARM?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DCKing 6y agoA comment yesterday in the other thread mentions that ARM currently sells their ARM CPU plus Mali GPU IP in a single package. Buying the IP together is much cheaper than buying just the CPU IP. This is why nearly every ARM CPU maker uses the Mali cores, and why PowerVR as a company is nearly dead. Reading this comment from Huang, I read it as if Nvidia wants to sell this package, but with Geforce IP instead of Mali IP.
- klelatti 6y agoOn the Arm in the datacenter point, Nvidia doesn't actually have to cut off IP from competitors to achieve dominance, just the ability to do so is enough. Would anyone continue to fund Ampere (the company not the graphics architecture) if they know that they are dependent on one of their biggest competitors for IP? I'm prepared to make a prediction: In 5 years Nvidia will be the only significant Arm supplier in the datacenter and all the other entrants will have given up - and that this explains why Intel's stock has risen over the last couple of days.
- wmf 6y agoI agree with this except to point out that Nuvia and Marvell are not dependent on Arm.
- mrtweetyhack 6y agoTSMC should have bought ARM
- thewindowmovie3 6y agoThis sounds like a blessing in disguise for Intel. Nvdia trying to compete in the server space effectively means that most of the other companies designing Arm servers will go out of business. Since Nvdia will not be interested in any of the other market Arm is in, it will be neglected.
- ThinkBeat 6y agoOld cynic: This all sounds like buzzword bingo and vaporware. It is one possible future. It also highly depends on the definition of "our time" -- We are joining arms with Arm to create the leading computing company for the age of AI. AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. Learning from data, AI supercomputers can write software no human can. Amazingly, AI software can perceive its environment, infer the best plan, and act intelligently. This new form of software will expand computing to every corner of the globe
- qlk1123 6y agoBack in May 2017, a talk in RISC-V con (https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI... ) was given. Here are the conclusions of the talk: - NVIDIA will use RISC-V processors in many of its products - We are contributing because RISC-V and our interests align - Contribute to the areas that you feel passionate about! Since then, I didn't observe much NVIDIA activities in RISC-V software community. But some NVIDIA people do participate Virtual Memory Task Group. Apparently, the stance have changed.
- Mupuff 6y agoI wonder how the world would've looked like if companies with valuation greater than 100 billion (adjusted to inflation) just wouldn't be allowed to purchase and\or merge with other companies.
- nerpderp82 6y agoNVidia will make CUDA cores available across the whole ARM ecosystem, from Cortex-M? on up. NVidia will integrate Arm cores into their GPUs where the GPU itself will start to become server hosted on a PCIe bus, potentially with its own Infiniband connection.