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Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- EternalUsenet 3y agoI do wonder if we will see these chips available for purchase to install in standard form factor ATX style systems? This is something I haven’t seen Arm crack into yet.
- bhouston 3y agoI think ATX style machines are very niche. Gamers love them and 3D artsits, but outside of that I think no one wants them anymore. I think that ARM-compatibility for games in the near term is a hard sell (although Blender, Maya, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro have been ported to ARM for running on Apple chips.) I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.
- smoldesu 3y agoNvidia should really be able to do both. Their integrated solutions like Orin scale up to a certain point, but the demand for modular compute is still enormous on the server side (and enthusiast market). Given that CUDA will support both going forward, I don't think there's a technical incentive to kill the market. My guess is that Nvidia will have a line of mobile cores/chipsets for integrators that want them, while also offering PCI-enabled boards for gamers and enthusiasts. Even Apple can't outrun the demand for a PCI-enabled machine, and they don't even support eGPUs. Nvidia's incentive to abandon ATX (or at least modularity) is even slimmer.
- xh-dude 3y agoI think you’re right about the class of device. MS can’t just treat ARM-based products the way it does now and make a leap in terms of end-user experience - wondering if this changes in the future.
- bhouston 3y agoGiven how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.
- timschmidt 3y agoWe've had them direct from Intel since at least 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing
- mattpavelle 3y agoExcept OP said, "combined with great graphics performances" - the NUCs never had good graphics performance ... and their CPU performance was actually not that great either.
- timschmidt 3y agoThe same can literally be said about M1/M2 Macs. Graphics performance compared to anything discrete is terrible. My 3090Ti wipes the floor with an M2, despite being last generation's model. M2's CPU performance only looks good when divided by power consumption. Whole categories of Intel and AMD chips outperform it, just at higher power usage.
- solardev 3y agoIt's way better than other integrated GPUs though. And performance per watt matters a lot for heat and noise. I eventually gave up my gaming PC because it was so loud and hot, switching to Geforce Now instead.
- timschmidt 3y agoI own an M1 and like it. But loading it up feels like loading up any other NUC style machine. I'm not sure on what axis it's better. Folks talk up the memory bandwidth, but in Apple's design, neither CPU, GPU, or NPU have access to full memory bandwidth. Not even close. Apple's caches are fast at 3 cycles, but AMD's are 10x larger. Apple's GPU claims further complicated given that they want everyone to use Metal as opposed to OpenGL, Vulkan, or DirectX on their platform. And compatibility and speed suffer as a result. Heat and noise are indeed important, from my perspective it simply seems that Apple's chosen a particular spot on the curve with an attractive outcropping thanks to early integration of on-package DRAM, but otherwise nothing special. Other manufacturers will ship on-package DRAM. AMD and NVIDIA have been shipping on-package HBM to the datacenter for an age. If anything, it seems that Apple's much larger product - the iphone - had a lot more to do with M1/M2 design than high end desktop equipment. On package DRAM is common in cell phones to reduce board size. And M1 is a scaled up A series SoC. I think it's a great product for Apple. But as someone who's supported Mac, Linux, and Windows machines at a university for a decade, it doesn't feel appreciably different from Intel NUCs over that timespan. AMD's 7840U is setting a new standard for power and performance on the PC side right now. And the two will continue to leapfrog.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vsskanth 3y agoWhy is it taking so long to launch competitive ARM Windows laptops ? Apple is already in it's third iteration of the M series and there's still no proper competition to the Macbooks.
- pseudosavant 3y agoBecause the best chip designs in the world are made by Apple, Intel, and AMD. ARM's chip designs are years behind those three. Apple has shown ARM can have excellent performance, but they are the only ones to do it so far. Android users have shown that they don't care about buying new phones with CPUs that are slower than 3-year-old iPhones.
- surgical_fire 3y agoBecause faster CPU on phones mostly doesn't matter. I have a midrange Android phone that I use to watch videos, listen to music and podcasts, internet browsing, chat, banking. The only thing I don't do on my phone is play games. I never once caught myself thinking "boy, this phone is slow, a faster CPU would do wonders here". It doesn't ever even feel hot to the touch. I bet it can run just fine most mobile games available. What the hell are people running on their phones that need a better CPU?
- pseudosavant 3y agoThe fact that my 6yo iPhone 8 is still as fast as a 3yo Pixel phone definitely is part of why I can keep my iPhones far longer than another other phone I've ever had. You rarely see 6yo Android phones still in use, because it'd be as slow as a 9yo iPhone.
- surgical_fire 3y agoI have a OnePlus 6T acquired in 2019 that is absolutely fine to this day. I only replaced it because they dropped support for new OS updates. I installed DivestOS on it and use it as a backup phone (i.e.: I take it with me to the gym, and keep my main phone at home). If they had kept support, I wouldn't even have replaced it.
- guerrilla 3y agoI hope so. Then I can put some weird OS on it that nobody uses because I really miss the security-through-obscurity I got back in the day running Linux on PowerPC before either were popular. Nobody was going to bother writing shellcode for that shit back then :P
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> Nvidia has quietly begun designing central processing units (CPUs) that would run Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Windows operating system... > Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology... > Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip.. (That would be the Nuvia core, I assume) Really, just read the whole thing. Its a brief but juicy report. Anyway, I wonder if Nvidia is going to make an SoC or a discrete CPU. Seems like an either-or proposition, as a big CPU with a small IGP (like AMD/Intel) doesn't make much sense for Nvidia.
- MenhirMike 3y ago> Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology Technically, the Platform Security Processor that's integrated in most (all?) Zen CPUs is already an ARM chip, though I guess that they mean actual general purpose CPUs.
- zokier 3y agoAMD has long history of ARM chips already, some examples: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/it-begins-amd-announces-its-first-arm-based-server-soc-64bit8core-opteron-a1100 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/it-begins-amd-announces-... https://www.anandtech.com/show/7990/amd-announces-k12-core-custom-64bit-arm-design-in-2016 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7990/amd-announces-k12-core-c...
- MikusR 3y agoNone of that was released.
- pseudosavant 3y agoI hope these ARM chips are Apple-level ARM designs. Apple has an ARM license that allows them to completely design their own cores. Only Apple's ARM designs have cutting edge performance. Everyone else (Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) uses stock, or nearly stock, ARM designs off-the-shelf that, performance-wise, aren't at all competitive with AMD/Intel. I'd love a Surface Pro with an M1/M2 chip, but the Qualcomm ARM chips are dogs.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThe problem with the current Qualcomm cores is that they are cheap and low power, but the new Nuvia cores should alleviate this. ...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores. Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued. Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.
- MenhirMike 3y agoDidn't they also lose one of their key employees? That was arguably in 2019, before the M1 came out, so I don't know how much of an impact Gerard Williams actually had, but I do wonder if they can keep the team together. (Edit: Just googled, Gerard Williams is now at Nuvia and in the middle of a lawsuit with Apple)
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYeah, and Nuvia (now Qualcomm) aren't the only ones who sniped them. Apple's effort to make a good modem also reportedly failed, so its not like their chip team are miracles workers. Not that I am skeptical. Apple has a long history of making good premium SoCs.
- pseudosavant 3y agoThis has probably been the biggest issue Apple has faced post M1. They've lost lots of top people to other companies trying to design performance cores like Apple's. That and their SoC development resources are spread across far more products than they used to be.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoOrin Nano could already be a fine desktop if you can accept Linux4Tegra as your one and only option. $499 and way more GPU than one would need. Releases March 2022 with a reasonably competent 6x Cortex-A78's.
- nerdjon 3y ago> Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers. I know that Mac was always in single digit marketshare (but still a healthy amount as far as money for apple goes) but still doubling seems to be quite an achievement? I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable? Or a mix of both. I will need to look this up. (Side note: I HATE when we see something as unhelpful as "doubled" and they could have included some numbers at least). On the topic of the article, I was kinda surprised to see that Microsoft has some initiates for Windows on Arm. I know it was technically a thing but it seemed like a thing that we just stopped hearing about? Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...). Also I have to wonder how much pre-built Windows computers are still sold vs moving to non traditional platforms like an iPad? I am curious because gaming will likely never move to arm. Unless I have missed it I have never seen ARM in a system that you can build yourself. Even Apple's ARM Mac Pro is questionably "Customizable" after the fact. I just don't see most PC gamers giving up the upgradability.
- deaddodo 3y ago> Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...). Microsoft had an AoT x86->ARM (and now, amd64->aarch64) binary translation layer before Apple's Rosetta had that capability (at least, publicly).
- jacooper 3y agoYes but it's still terrible with a much bigger performance loss than rosseta, partially because the M chips have some tricks for better emulation.
- deaddodo 3y agoThe performance is actually much better than most people from that skillset originally expected, and it generally gets better performance from arbitrary code paths/machine logic than Rosetta does. Rosetta outperforms it because of hardware assistance, not because Microsoft's implementation is bad (let alone "terrible").
- seanalltogether 3y agoI'm really curious if unified cpu/gpu chips are the future for laptop/desktop hardware. Mac is now unified across its product line, consoles are unified, phones are unified. My limited understanding though is that unified memory means giving up either high speed (for the cpu), or high bandwidth (for the gpu). Is that correct?
- wmf 3y agoIt's more of a low latency (DDR/LPDDR) vs. high bandwidth (GDDR/HBM) tradeoff.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYou can have your cake and eat it with a wide LPDDR5X bus. This is what Apple does, and its fine. Other specialized chips (like Tenstorrent's accelerators) do this too. I think an AMD 7900-like approach where the memory controllers/cache are on tiny external chips is particularly practical. Its efficient and economical. I hope AMD (and others) repeat this with laptop CPUS. GDDRX is not a good fit for laptops anyway because its so power hungry. GPUs and the Xbox/Playstation use it just because its the absolute cheapest bandwidth/$, at the cost of everything else. HBM is very expensive and being hoovered up by the AI market. I wouldn't count on seeing it in consumer stuff again.
- phh 3y agoWell, I have the first model of laptops using nVidia Arm chip, it's called Toshiba AC100, and rocked a nVidia Tegra 2 in 2010. It launched with Android, but I helped put GNU/Linux on it (got my first mainline author-ship with it), and daily drove it for a year at university (back then not everyone had laptops) It was a hell of a device, and to this day I'm still missing anything close to it. 10 inch, 900g, 10 hour battery life (which was unthinkable on PCs back then), removable battery so when traveling I just had two batteries, extremely sturdy (I used to launch it in the air, and failed some times without worrying) [1]. That being said, even back then it was seriously limited, and I would max out the RAM just by doing ssh + quasselclient. By killing quasselclient I could have enough RAM to launch firefox to a simple web page, but that's it. [1] It wasn't made to be sturdy, it's just that there was basically no weight, the pcb was very small, and it had pretty huge bezels
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThe Tegra series is still ongoing, its just marketed at self-driving vehicles. You can get dev boards, but they are hilariously expensive, and I'd guess the idle/low load performance pales in comparison to other vendors these days.
- MikusR 3y agoI had tegra 2 tablet. Couldn't play video my year older phone could. Also didn't have NEON so was stuck using old versions of everything.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zokier 3y agonv has been making tegras for ages now, and i'm pretty sure some of them ran windows at some point. so this doesn't seem that big news, especially if they don't have an oem in pocket yet.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI don't understand the aarch64 hotness. Is it because Apple did it? At the end of the day it's just a different instruction set- what makes that such an advantage?
- wmf 3y agoPeople are misunderstanding the source of Apple's advantage.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoThat's what I think but I'm assuming that I'm naive. Apple's advantage is the vertical integration, putting memory on-package, and buying the best node.
- wmf 3y agoEven that is too clever IMO. I don't think there's much gain in integration or on-package memory.
- butchlugrod 3y agoThere are definitely gains with the on-package memory, but that's only the tip of the spear. The tight integration of hardware and software is also an advantage -- look at how Apple Silicon is optimized for faster retain/release of NSObjects, with less memory overhead. This is a function performed by every piece of software on the system, but executed several orders of magnitude faster than on x64 because Apple can customize the hardware to fit their model of computing. Earlier discussion of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25203924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25203924 The only other designer of ARM chips at this scale is Qualcomm, and they stick to creating very general purpose designs (chips that conform to known designs and can be decent for all of their customers.) The exception being some minor one-off tweaks for Microsoft's ARM laptop. Intel and AMD are in the same boat -- they can do new and innovative things in hardware, but it doesn't really mean anything unless software is optimized for it. And if software is never optimized for it, was it worth the engineering investment? Of course Apple is also offloading a lot of stuff from the CPU cores into specialized on-die units for machine learning, video CODECs, etc. Along with very decent GPUs. No, it's not all strictly CPU stuff, but it does all matter in the end. Not all of what Apple is doing is everyone's cup of tea, and no it's not "the best performance in the world", but it's hard to find better performance in the same power envelope.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoPrior to switching to Apple Silicon, Apple prepared the path with their effort to push for universal binaries by default Software made yesterday were already prepared to run on their new silicon Rosetta was only a transition helper, not meant to be a permanent solution Microsoft didn't do any of that, and still doesn't, their leadership is clueless and dangerous If Microsoft doesn't put in the effort, it'll never work Let's hope there's no secret agreement to exclude Linux (?AMD AI?) I wish Valve would encourage developpers to submit ARM binaries to prepare for the future... Why only Apple is able to pull it off? Why this lack of care from everybody else? Meanwhile.. https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-to-launch-for-pc-windows-might-be-in-trouble/ https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-to-launch-for-pc-win...
- bhouston 3y ago> Microsoft didn't do any of that, and still doesn't, their leadership is clueless and dangerous It did with .NET but most software isn't .NET I think.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agodotnet supported Apple Silicon way before ARM for Windows, this behavior shouldn't be overlooked, this is part of the issues with Microsoft, their lack of care/anticipation
- smoldesu 3y agoAnticipation of what? Microsoft has "supported" ARM as far back as Windows RT, but developers and integrators don't care. The hardware didn't (and still doesn't) sell, and every usable core design is either from the stone age or completely proprietary. Somehow, x86 SOCs are easier to iterate on. Dotnet supports Apple Silicon for the same reason it supports AArch64-Linux; it's a real user platform. Windows-on-ARM is really not, and it won't get the attention it needs until attractive hardware is ready to ship.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoAnyone remember xScale? Intel once upon a time had an arm division. They (foolishly) sold the entire division Marvell.
- CalChris 3y agoYeah, Intel got xScale (née StrongArm) from Digital Equipment Corp as part of a settlement after the Alpha lawsuit for infringing on Pentium patents. Intel bought StrongArm which maybe meant Intel didn't really want it and sold it to Marvell. Intel didn't want Alpha either which was sold to Compaq, the last resort and buyer of all things great and small.
- a6 3y agoIs this a continuation of the existing Grace Hopper SoC [0]? [0] - https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/grace-hopper-superchip/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/grace-hopper-superc...
- wmf 3y agoA Grace Hopper workstation sounds cool but I would expect Nvidia PC chips to be an evolution of Orin.
- TradingPlaces 3y agoQualcomm+Nuvia PC ARM chip announcing tomorrow. “Snapdragon X” Of course, ARM is suing them over it. Oh well.
- dingi 3y agoAre we rooting for an ecosystem where there are next to no standards? Not even a standard boot protocol. The world is going to be full of devices with one off SOCs with terrible after release support.
- solarkraft 3y agoNeat, since Qualcomm seems intent on producing unusable chips.