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Huang'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 yest
by DCKing 6y ago
Huang'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.
- systemvoltage 6y agoMinor nit: Architecture and not “Package”, the latter has specific meaning. ARM defines not just instruction set, but also the architecture - Core, Memory layout, peripheral busses, etc.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoAhh, the old comcast TV+Internet is cheaper than just Internet trick....
- mtgx 6y agoThey did, and failed: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-to-licence-GPU-technology-to-third-party-manufacturers.94856.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-to-licence-GPU-technolo... My guess is they failed because Geforce at the time was too much of a "desktop architecture", and my guess is that it still is. But now that they own Arm they can just tell all Mali customers "take it or leave it."
- gpm 6y agoA less cynical take is that they can now ask Mali customers "how can we modify this better and more mature architecture to be appropriate for your use case"
- choiway 6y agoI hope this is true.
- modo_mario 6y agoAm sad to say I'd call that take more naive more so than less cynical.
- klelatti 6y agoIt's a great line and one that I would expect Jensen to take - and it's almost certainly true - to an extent. I'd expect Nvidia to keep the Arm ecosystem alive, but only where they don't see an opportunity to take control. So they keep Radeon off Exynos (and incidentally why couldn't they do that anyway?) by offering GeForce. But elsewhere they can deny Arm IP to other firms where they have a competitive SoC. Take one example. So Nvidia / Arm invest heavily in data center focused designs - are they really going to offer this IP to Ampere / Amazon on equal terms when compared to an Nvidia CPU? As Ben says 'color me skeptical'. Essentially they will have a full overview of the Arm ecosystem - will lots of confidential information - and pick and choose where they drive out competitors whilst farming license fees from the rest.
- DCKing 6y ago> (and incidentally why couldn't they do that anyway?) Why try to compete on merit when you can swoop in and dictate the market to do your bidding? Coming at it from this perspective, it's looking like almost the same old Nvidia again :) > Take one example. So Nvidia / Arm invest heavily in data center focused designs - are they really going to offer this IP to Ampere / Amazon on equal terms when compared to an Nvidia CPU? As Ben says 'color me skeptical'. That I don't believe, indeed. They will crush their datacenter competition, but I think the server market here might ironically a bit more flexible in moving to different ISAs when compared to mobile.
- klelatti 6y agoAbsolutely! I think actually the biggest constraint on Nvidia will be 'bandwidth' (management not memory!). Where do they focus their energies and where do they leave the Arm ecosystem alone. Incidentally Intel's stock seems to have risen over the last day or so which is a bit surprising given the datacenter story?
- AlphaSite 6y agoI think my biggest concern is Nvidia is looking to be another Qualcomm. With all of the issues there.
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- rektide 6y ago> If Nvidia truely sees ARM as an opportunity kill off Mali and expand Geforce's install base, Perfect replacement, from one unsupported hard to use non-open-source Linux-drivered gpu to another hard to use non open source Linux drivered gpu. > I do hope AMD can take the battle to Nvidia on ARM too, and that Qualcomm and PowerVR find ways to stay relevant. Qualcomm's Adreno amusingly enough came from AMD, as Imageon, in 2009. I definitely hope AMD can get back in the mobile game though. Good luck to powervr & anyone else too. You are probably up for some hard competition soon!! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageon
- pantalaimon 6y ago> from one unsupported hard to use non-open-source Linux-drivered gpu to another hard to use non open source Linux drivered gpu. I thought panfrost was pretty good these days
- wmf 6y agoDo any Android phones use Panfrost?
- david-gpu 6y agoThe first version of Adreno had some fixed-function blocks from AMD (and Bitboys), but the programmable shader core came from Qualcomm's never-commercialized Qshader architecture. The result was a buggy mess which took a ton of effort on our drivers to debug and correct. In hindsight, I'm amazed at how well it worked given the schedule and the magnitude of the work involved in fusing those two architectures.
- thewindowmovie3 6y agoDoes nvdia even have product which would work at the power envelop that Mali works?
- paulmd 6y agoNot all the way down to <5W TDP but Orin goes down to 5W. They had tablets at one point, and they've continued to refresh their product line for automotive and set-top use. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15800/nvidia-announces-new-drive-platforms-with-orin-and-ampere- https://www.anandtech.com/show/15800/nvidia-announces-new-dr...
- nl 6y agoThe Jetson Nano has a predefined 5W mode (see page 33 on [1]), so presumably the SoC could be even lower. [1] https://info.nvidia.com/rs/156-OFN-742/images/Jetson_Nano_Webinar.pdf https://info.nvidia.com/rs/156-OFN-742/images/Jetson_Nano_We...
- stefan_ 6y agoBut Mali is an also-ran in a market where the one making all the money has their own solution. What does "sell Geforce like ARM sells Mali" mean? Make it an utter commodity, a bunch of transistors in one much bigger chip, like the GPU in a console but valued even less? Nobody knows the name of what you are selling and 90% of the market would rather have more runtime on their phone than ever care in the slightest for 3D game performance? Mobile GPUs are like integrated graphics on CPUs, those didn't kill AMD or Nvidia because that entire market doesn't want to spend a dime to begin with.
- jayd16 6y ago>Mobile GPUs are like integrated graphics on CPUs I really don't think so. For the high end PC consumer, integrated performance can be ignored because you'll get a dedicated card. Not so with mobile SOCs. It makes sense that nVidia might want to squeeze out Qualcomm and get their GPUs in Samsung flagships, for example.
- paulmd 6y agoBecause it pushes the CUDA ecosystem into dominance of yet another platform. You can run your acceleration routine on anything from a smartphone/raspberry pi to an enterprise accelerator, one algorithm. And it will be everywhere, a defacto capability of most reference-implementation ARM devices. (and sure opencl too but that's too loose a standard to have any platform effect, it's just a standard that everyone implements a little differently and needs to be ported to their own compiler/hardware/etc, so there is no common codebase and toolchain that everyone can use like with CUDA.) Everyone laughed at Huang saying that NVIDIA is a software company. He was right.
- nerpderp82 6y agoAMD is going to "own" x86 for the foreseeable future. AMD will have to either produce cut down x86 cores or start using RISC-V to compete with NVidia across their larger portfolio.
- cma 6y agoHopefully they would need to divest Mali to an independent spinoff rather than just squash it in the acquisition.