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One thing I've long wondered is whether Nvidia would make a CPU and price it very aggressively, just to weaken Intel and AMD. Commoditize your complements. If

One thing I've long wondered is whether Nvidia would make a CPU and price it very aggressively, just to weaken Intel and AMD. Commoditize your complements. If you kill the x86 monopoly, CUDA could easily be the last proprietary lock in for general purpose compute. Not a bad place to be.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
We already have cheap comodity ARM chips, it's called the Raspberry PI . It didn't make much of a dent in the X86 market. It's a niche of it's own in the consumer tinkerer and industrial embedded devices, but desktop computing is a tough market to crack, as explained by Linus Torvalds. Having (non-Apple) ARM assault the X86 ecosystem will take a lot of out of the box thinking and, most importantly, cooperation for standardization amongst the HW vendors for open standards, which is exactly what Nvidia doesn't like to do, as they always prefer the locked down ecosystem approach, contrary to the openness that lead the comodization and popularity of the IBM PC clones.
- adventured 5y ago
  > We already have cheap comodity ARM chips, it's called the Raspberry PI . No we don't, and no it's not. At least not as far as the mass consumer is concerned. Show me where a consumer can walk into Best Buy and purchase a PC with a decently powerful and inexpensive ARM processor powering it in place of Intel or AMD. That's something that Nvidia can actually make happen given its resources. The organization behind the Raspberry PI is microscopic by comparison, they have no resources to manage such an enormous consumer front (not even remotely close in fact). Your premise about the Raspberry PI is like techies on HN pretending that there's no need for x y z product/service, because you can just run your own social network on a machine in your closet at home, you can just run your own file server, you can just run your own mail server. No, consumers are never going to do that en masse. And consumers are never going to lean on the Raspberry PI to assemble their own machines either in massive quantities; that has to be a comprehensive, packaged product sold to them via retail that they plug in and use with zero assembly or hands-on customization required. It has to be relatively inexpensive and powerful enough to undercut and compete with what Intel and AMD bring to the table. Raspberry PI isn't even in the discussion.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    While I agree that Raspberry PI is not the same being able to buy PCs with an ARM chip - I must say you are over-reaching with your argument. Have a look at: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ this is a small PC, fitting inside a keyboard, based on the Raspberry PI. No assembly needed other than connecting it to peripherals - but that's like any other PC. Other than the keyboard housing it, it comes with a mouse and a PSU. It costs 100 USD and available from many vendors around the world, e.g.: https://chicagodist.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-kit?src=raspberrypi https://chicagodist.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-kit?src=ra...
  - liamwestray 5y ago
    Uhh. The ARM-based M1 Mac mini is literally sold at Best Buy for under $700. It will run circles around any desktop PC within the same price range. And yes, the Raspberry Pi 4/400 is perfectly usable for general desktop computing for students. The default desktop OS is intuitive and it includes modern browsers, can watch Netflix/Disney+ DRM media, and run LibreOffice or WPS Office. Similarly, the Pine64 Pinebook Pro is actually quite serviceable for general desktop use at < $250, but you can also buy a $999 M1 MacBook Air at Best Buy if your needs cannot be satisfied by sub $250 computers.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      Afaik the raspberry PI can't hardware accelerate stuff like Netflix in Browser so video watching experience is pretty ass.
      - liamwestray 5y ago
        You can do 1080p on the Pi4. https://itnext.io/the-2021-onward-guide-to-install-netflix-on-raspberry-pi-smartphone-as-the-remote-control-2e7662ccc80 https://itnext.io/the-2021-onward-guide-to-install-netflix-o... Edit: I've personally done it in browser. It works.
        5y ago
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "We already have cheap comodity ARM chips, it's called the Raspberry PI" It's like 5 times slower than the chip in my 10 year old laptop.
  - vardump 5y ago
    Raspberry Pi 4 is not going to be 5 times slower than your 10 year old laptop, unless it was really specced out. IIRC, RPi 4 is about as fast as Core 2 Duo.
    - jotm 5y ago
      Funnily enough, a C2D T9600 (midrange mobile dual core at the time) is 5 times slower than a Core i7-3610qm (10 years old, entry level mobile quad core) :D
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        Intel performance jumps were crazy back then. You could expect +50% improvement between generations but you also gotta remember process manufacturing was moving fast back then too. 90nm to 65nm to 45nm within a few years.
    - Retric 5y ago
      It’s not that crazy, i7-3770K @ 153.48 GFLOPs vs Broadcom BCM2711 @ 13.5 GFLOPS. You can get various benchmarks to favor one over the other, but it’s still a large gap.
      - liamwestray 5y ago
        That era of I3-i7 was 20-150 Gflops. Given the Pi is a low-cost device, it's not terrible unreasonable to at least compare it to the 20-50 Gflop CPUs of that period. But it's also not exactly fair as the HW Decode for video really makes them feel significantly faster in most process intensive workloads for general consumers, and USB3/eMMC/Micro SD cards are significantly faster than the IO used on iX-2000 to iX-4000 era computers (and later). The Pi4 is almost modern desktop capable for office/admin work. You're at about 25% CPU utilization using HW accelerated 1080p video on a Pi4. Still a little slow, but desktop software and most web apps run as well on a 4gb or 8gb Pi4 as they do on a low-end PC.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  People aren't buying rpis to plug 3090s into.
- reitzensteinm 5y ago
  On the high end we have Graviton and M1, which are both exclusive to their creator. Just releasing something competitive with Graviton that's accessible to the whole industry would accelerate the shift substantially. Where are the ARM instances on Google and Azure? Not to mention Oracle and IBM and other smaller cloud vendors. Companies running their own datacenters like Facebook and CloudFlare. Dedicated server providers too. There's a lot of high end volume in this space to attack the margins of. Nvidia prefers the locked down approach because it gives them a differentiated product with great margins. That doesn't mean they're incapable of a side project to torch the margins of their biggest competitors.
  - my123 5y ago
    > Just releasing something competitive with Graviton that's accessible to the whole industry Ampere Altra, which has even more cores. > Where are the ARM instances on Google and Azure? Not to mention Oracle and IBM and other smaller cloud vendors. Azure: stay tuned, it's soon. Oracle Cloud: already out since a while :)
    - reitzensteinm 5y ago
      The Altra does look great, but there's a spotty history of smaller players building products in this space and not making it. Nvidia has staying power, and nobody will be worried about whether they'll go bankrupt mid rollout. I completely missed their deal with Oracle, though. That's pretty cool. To be clear, in my opinion the shift is going to happen regardless of whether Nvidia steps in - I just think they could accelerate it significantly and it would benefit them to do so.
    - tcmart14 5y ago
      And for IBM, they have their own architecture to look after, OpenPOWER.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    One of the most amusing reasons why ARM fails to compete with x86 is that it simply isn't available. You have to go to specific vendors and get their specific flavor of ARM which means you must always consider a x86 fallback.
ip26 5y ago
At the cost of developing & manufacturing a competitive chip, would that make sense? I mean, if developing that chip takes half your opex, can you just give up margin on so much of your spend?
- reitzensteinm 5y ago
  I don't think something like Graviton would come close to half their opex. Ampere, linked elsewhere, made a competitive chip with just half a billion in total funding, and most of that was to scale up after the prototypes were built. Who knows, though. Nvidia's R&D expenses skyrocketed over the last five years and maybe Grace is a large part of it.
downrightmike 5y ago
Probably why they wanted to buy ARM and got shut down.
- mlindner 5y ago
  They can make their own ARM chip without buying ARM.
  - urthor 5y ago
    Well as we have seen, NVIDIA probably has got a killer ARM chip in the lab for release in 24 months.
  - perfopt 5y ago
    They have tried and failed - Tegra
    - terafo 5y ago
      It failed in a tablet (which isn't that big outside of iPads to begin with TBH) and smartphone markets, but Tegra X1 chip is incredibly successful. Nintendo sold more than a 100 million of their Switch consoles, and they all are powered by Nvidia Tegra. And they never tried to do a full desktop chip.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

We already have cheap comodity ARM chips, it's called the Raspberry PI . It didn't make much of a dent in the X86 market. It's a niche of it's own in the consumer tinkerer and industrial embedded devices, but desktop computing is a tough market to crack, as explained by Linus Torvalds. Having (non-Apple) ARM assault the X86 ecosystem will take a lot of out of the box thinking and, most importantly, cooperation for standardization amongst the HW vendors for open standards, which is exactly what Nvidia doesn't like to do, as they always prefer the locked down ecosystem approach, contrary to the openness that lead the comodization and popularity of the IBM PC clones.

adventured 5y ago
> We already have cheap comodity ARM chips, it's called the Raspberry PI . No we don't, and no it's not. At least not as far as the mass consumer is concerned. Show me where a consumer can walk into Best Buy and purchase a PC with a decently powerful and inexpensive ARM processor powering it in place of Intel or AMD. That's something that Nvidia can actually make happen given its resources. The organization behind the Raspberry PI is microscopic by comparison, they have no resources to manage such an enormous consumer front (not even remotely close in fact). Your premise about the Raspberry PI is like techies on HN pretending that there's no need for x y z product/service, because you can just run your own social network on a machine in your closet at home, you can just run your own file server, you can just run your own mail server. No, consumers are never going to do that en masse. And consumers are never going to lean on the Raspberry PI to assemble their own machines either in massive quantities; that has to be a comprehensive, packaged product sold to them via retail that they plug in and use with zero assembly or hands-on customization required. It has to be relatively inexpensive and powerful enough to undercut and compete with what Intel and AMD bring to the table. Raspberry PI isn't even in the discussion.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  While I agree that Raspberry PI is not the same being able to buy PCs with an ARM chip - I must say you are over-reaching with your argument. Have a look at: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ this is a small PC, fitting inside a keyboard, based on the Raspberry PI. No assembly needed other than connecting it to peripherals - but that's like any other PC. Other than the keyboard housing it, it comes with a mouse and a PSU. It costs 100 USD and available from many vendors around the world, e.g.: https://chicagodist.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-kit?src=raspberrypi https://chicagodist.com/products/raspberry-pi-400-kit?src=ra...
- liamwestray 5y ago
  Uhh. The ARM-based M1 Mac mini is literally sold at Best Buy for under $700. It will run circles around any desktop PC within the same price range. And yes, the Raspberry Pi 4/400 is perfectly usable for general desktop computing for students. The default desktop OS is intuitive and it includes modern browsers, can watch Netflix/Disney+ DRM media, and run LibreOffice or WPS Office. Similarly, the Pine64 Pinebook Pro is actually quite serviceable for general desktop use at < $250, but you can also buy a $999 M1 MacBook Air at Best Buy if your needs cannot be satisfied by sub $250 computers.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Afaik the raspberry PI can't hardware accelerate stuff like Netflix in Browser so video watching experience is pretty ass.
    - liamwestray 5y ago
      You can do 1080p on the Pi4. https://itnext.io/the-2021-onward-guide-to-install-netflix-on-raspberry-pi-smartphone-as-the-remote-control-2e7662ccc80 https://itnext.io/the-2021-onward-guide-to-install-netflix-o... Edit: I've personally done it in browser. It works.
      - 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"We already have cheap comodity ARM chips, it's called the Raspberry PI" It's like 5 times slower than the chip in my 10 year old laptop.
- vardump 5y ago
  Raspberry Pi 4 is not going to be 5 times slower than your 10 year old laptop, unless it was really specced out. IIRC, RPi 4 is about as fast as Core 2 Duo.
  - jotm 5y ago
    Funnily enough, a C2D T9600 (midrange mobile dual core at the time) is 5 times slower than a Core i7-3610qm (10 years old, entry level mobile quad core) :D
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      Intel performance jumps were crazy back then. You could expect +50% improvement between generations but you also gotta remember process manufacturing was moving fast back then too. 90nm to 65nm to 45nm within a few years.
  - Retric 5y ago
    It’s not that crazy, i7-3770K @ 153.48 GFLOPs vs Broadcom BCM2711 @ 13.5 GFLOPS. You can get various benchmarks to favor one over the other, but it’s still a large gap.
    - liamwestray 5y ago
      That era of I3-i7 was 20-150 Gflops. Given the Pi is a low-cost device, it's not terrible unreasonable to at least compare it to the 20-50 Gflop CPUs of that period. But it's also not exactly fair as the HW Decode for video really makes them feel significantly faster in most process intensive workloads for general consumers, and USB3/eMMC/Micro SD cards are significantly faster than the IO used on iX-2000 to iX-4000 era computers (and later). The Pi4 is almost modern desktop capable for office/admin work. You're at about 25% CPU utilization using HW accelerated 1080p video on a Pi4. Still a little slow, but desktop software and most web apps run as well on a 4gb or 8gb Pi4 as they do on a low-end PC.
tedunangst 5y ago
People aren't buying rpis to plug 3090s into.
reitzensteinm 5y ago
On the high end we have Graviton and M1, which are both exclusive to their creator. Just releasing something competitive with Graviton that's accessible to the whole industry would accelerate the shift substantially. Where are the ARM instances on Google and Azure? Not to mention Oracle and IBM and other smaller cloud vendors. Companies running their own datacenters like Facebook and CloudFlare. Dedicated server providers too. There's a lot of high end volume in this space to attack the margins of. Nvidia prefers the locked down approach because it gives them a differentiated product with great margins. That doesn't mean they're incapable of a side project to torch the margins of their biggest competitors.
- my123 5y ago
  > Just releasing something competitive with Graviton that's accessible to the whole industry Ampere Altra, which has even more cores. > Where are the ARM instances on Google and Azure? Not to mention Oracle and IBM and other smaller cloud vendors. Azure: stay tuned, it's soon. Oracle Cloud: already out since a while :)
  - reitzensteinm 5y ago
    The Altra does look great, but there's a spotty history of smaller players building products in this space and not making it. Nvidia has staying power, and nobody will be worried about whether they'll go bankrupt mid rollout. I completely missed their deal with Oracle, though. That's pretty cool. To be clear, in my opinion the shift is going to happen regardless of whether Nvidia steps in - I just think they could accelerate it significantly and it would benefit them to do so.
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    And for IBM, they have their own architecture to look after, OpenPOWER.
- imtringued 5y ago
  One of the most amusing reasons why ARM fails to compete with x86 is that it simply isn't available. You have to go to specific vendors and get their specific flavor of ARM which means you must always consider a x86 fallback.

ip26 5y ago

At the cost of developing & manufacturing a competitive chip, would that make sense? I mean, if developing that chip takes half your opex, can you just give up margin on so much of your spend?

reitzensteinm 5y ago
I don't think something like Graviton would come close to half their opex. Ampere, linked elsewhere, made a competitive chip with just half a billion in total funding, and most of that was to scale up after the prototypes were built. Who knows, though. Nvidia's R&D expenses skyrocketed over the last five years and maybe Grace is a large part of it.

downrightmike 5y ago

Probably why they wanted to buy ARM and got shut down.

mlindner 5y ago
They can make their own ARM chip without buying ARM.
- urthor 5y ago
  Well as we have seen, NVIDIA probably has got a killer ARM chip in the lab for release in 24 months.
- perfopt 5y ago
  They have tried and failed - Tegra
  - terafo 5y ago
    It failed in a tablet (which isn't that big outside of iPads to begin with TBH) and smartphone markets, but Tegra X1 chip is incredibly successful. Nintendo sold more than a 100 million of their Switch consoles, and they all are powered by Nvidia Tegra. And they never tried to do a full desktop chip.