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Nvidia to Challenge Intel with Arm-Based Processors for PCs
- noloblo 3y agobypass paywall : https://archive.ph/5oX5Z https://archive.ph/5oX5Z
- quicklime 3y agoDoes anyone else just get stuck in a “I’m not a robot” loop with these links now?
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoThread from 5 hours ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990354
- hurryer 3y agoWindows is most valuable because of all the software for it. They need some sort of emulation.
- CharlesW 3y agoWhich they have! I use it daily on my MacBook Air, via Parallels, and it works great. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoWINE and Proton work very well for a lot of things. Its rapidly reaching the point where Windows is the least useful most foibled way to run Windows apps. No one can make a Steam Deck that works a third as well, and that's 90% because everyone else relies on Windows. If you need anything other than a pure desktop form factor, it feels like Windows is a bad fit. It's unknown how long Windows can remain the top desktop option. And app emulation is great elsewhere.
- jakobson14 3y agowine and proton do nothing to port across architectures from x86 to ARM. whenever anyone uses wine to run windows software on arm linux they do so using qemu/fex via hangover.
- SubiculumCode 3y agooffice 365?
- StressedDev 3y agoThe ARM version of Windows runs ARM and x64 software. It works very well.
- longstation 3y agoI think another important message from the same article is: AMD is also preparing Arm-based CPUs.
- bradfa 3y agoAgain? https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/01/14/will-amds-seattle-push-arm-servers-into-the-mainstream/amp/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/01/14/will-amds-seattle-pu...
- andrewstuart 3y agoI really think Intel will be hard to displace on the desktop. There is a very low tolerance for incompatibility and ARM, whilst great in controlled environments, just cannot compete with Intel architecture in compatibility.
- outside1234 3y agoPlus Microsoft is not super invested in making ARM shine like Apple is
- StressedDev 3y agoI am not sure where you got that from. Windows runs great on ARM. I got one the Windows Dev Kit 2023 (it's an 8 core ARM PC with 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD). I ran run Windows, Office, Visual Studio, GIT, etc. I suspect a lot of games will not run but everything else works fine. This includes x64 (x86 64-bit software). Also, MS has made a lot of their software ARM compatible. Office 365, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio code all have native ARM binaries. In Visual Studio's case, it has fewer features than the x64 version (mostly fewer supported SDKs). Overall, I can't tell I am even running on an ARM system because it feels like an x64 system. It is responsive, fast and just works.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rilut 3y agoHow is your experience with printers?
- TreeInBuxton 3y agoHP's SUPD has support for ARM-based platforms, which I have found to work well on the more modern printers I have tried
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
- daft_pink 3y agoI think AMD is the most likely to win this race as they are way more reasonable than Nvidia and Qualcomm in terms of margins and better at working with the vendors.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThat is a reasonable assessment. Nvidia and Qualcomm are just so... Nvidia and Qualcomm like. They can't help themselves. That being said, history also suggests AMD will bungle the software side.
- photonbeam 3y agoI’ve always been baffled by this, why hasn’t AMD brought in an army of software devs
- sfmike 3y agoThey have and thats the problem
- mtoner23 3y agoSo much easier said than done. Have you met those kernel/SW people? They are hard to poach and hard to manage well.
- gleenn 3y agoPay them more money maybe?
- sherincall 3y agoBecause of stock appreciation, they'd need to pay up to 10x what the other company is already paying. Consider a senior SWE at e.g. NVIDIA making $300k, let's say halfsies split between base and RSU. The $150k RSU grant from a few years ago that still hasn't fully vested is worth $1M now. So even for a 50% increase in nominal total comp, it doesn't make financial sense to switch. I don't know that anyone can afford to pay their engineers 10x more than the competition, and then also offer a cheaper product with thinner margins.
- TylerE 3y agoSomething like an Apple M-Series, but with enough RTX cores bolted on to provide, say, PS5 levels of GPU... that could be pretty compelling. I like my M1 Studio a ton, but I do wish it had a bit more GPU.
- VHRanger 3y agoThey've been building the Tegra for the switch and shield. I'd be interested in more recent SoCs from them
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYou can already buy Orin dev boards, they just cost a fortune.
- kcb 3y agoAnd have terrible software support. The Nvidia SDK Manager that you need to flash the OS image only runs on specific old versions of Ubuntu. Then you basically get stuck with whatever Linux kernel you get at release.
- moondev 3y agoI have an AGX Xavier running ESXi arm edition. This makes it easy to run any Linux aarch64 distro that provides a uefi iso installer. It even supports running windows for arm vms. Great way to put the 32G of memory and NVME to use
- pier25 3y agoThe M2 improved the GPU considerably and the M3 is rumoured to improve it even further.
- TylerE 3y agoI look forward to it then. I actually bought mine through a best buy program where after, I think it was 24 months I basically have the option of making either a balloon payment and keeping the machine I have, or turning it in but applying at least a substantial percentage of payments so far (might even be 100%) towards the latest generation. So, I'll probably do that and get whatever M2/M3 Studio is available, and hopefully spring for the Ultra double the everything version instead of the base. Even still, my basest of base 32GB M1 Studio actually games pretty well in the few games that are really properly optimized for it (e.g. arm native, vulkan)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vondur 3y agoSome of the Nvidia Jetson kits seemed to be pretty good little PC's. They run Linux fine, but Windows seems to be lagging for ARM at the moment.
- adrian_b 3y agoThe Jetson Orin kits have decent performance and good documentation, but they are extremely overpriced in comparison with equivalent computers with Intel or AMD CPUs.
- glitchc 3y agoDOA. It's one thing for Apple with full vertical integration to succeed, quite another for NVidia to make any inroads where they have no control over the OS stack. The Windows ARM version is not going to save them.
- returnInfinity 3y agoMost likely, but Jensen hows how important Software is. Maybe there is a chance he can pull a rabbit out of his leather Jacket.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoLinux ARM works perfectly well. Unless you want to play videogames, Linux ARM is probably preferable to Intel.
- sangnoir 3y agoNvidia can have full vertical integration in thr data center. If they can have high memory bandwidth and integrate it with their next-gen GPU (e.g. with a custom high-bandwidth fabric allowing for more shared memory), they'll sell a lot of them to hyperscalers and ML training crowd. Lower cooling costs may be a co-headline item.
- initplus 3y agoApple's ARM switch worked because they have tight control over the whole software stack, and actually worked really hard to provide transparent support for older x86-64 software. Windows for ARM has none of this support and has basically zilch market share as a result. If Microsoft releases an equivalent of Rosetta at the same level of quality it will be a different story. But I can't see what influence Nvidia has over this?
- pornel 3y agoApple has fat binaries, and made Xcode produce them by default, with seamless cross-compilation. AFAIK Windows has nothing like that. There are no fat binaries. Cross-compilation is fiddly and needs to be done manually. There is a massive difference between developers just needing to press the "Build" button again (with no code or config changes), and requiring developers to manually add support for both architectures the hard way.
- jamesgeck0 3y ago> If Microsoft releases an equivalent of Rosetta at the same level of quality it will be a different story. Microsoft has had their own Rosetta equivalent for a few years now. In theory application compatibility is more comprehensive than Rosetta as it supports much older applications, including 32-bit applications. In practice (likely as a result of trying to support so much more stuff) application compatibility isn't as rock solid as Rosetta for every application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x86-emulation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
- DanielHB 3y agoApple's Rosetta uses some special hardware in the M1 and later chips to make some x86/x64 translated instructions much faster. I believe it was the load and store instructions. Microsoft doesn't have access to these instructions for their own implementation (because they are not ARM standard), but theoretically they could have qualcomm or other SoC providers add some custom hardware that does the same. But in a fragmented landscape that can be hard, some windows laptop SoCs might have it, some might not.
- iamgopal 3y agoHopefully they target Linux
- hlandau 3y agoI'm sure this will be dependent on lots of signed closed-source firmware like Intel and AMD platforms, but there's always room for NVIDIA to surprise me, break character and do the opposite. It would attract a lot of people to the platform who want or need open firmware.
- nologic01 3y agoAlas, feels like signaling to support the overheated hype and trillion dollar valuation. Real competition in this space would be really good. The shape of mass computing is inceasingly a tortured collusion game rather than a true market. Anybody who used a raspberry pi knows that the desktop computing landscape is not what it used to be. For peanuts you can have a rock-solid linux PC that covers the computing needs of like the 99% of people. With a convergent OS you'd also cover the mobile use case, where conveniently Arm is already the norm. The future will not look like the past but speculators beware, timing earthquakes is not possible.
- nickstinemates 3y agoI hope Nvidia makes an Os too. Anything to threaten Windows.
- justinclift 3y agoWhat kind of benefits do you reckon they'd get from doing their own OS? Guessing you mean something more than they're own Linux distro too?
- jacobgorm 3y agoJust wondering how many hugabytes we will have to download just to get Hello World to link and run…
- AltruisticGapHN 3y agoMaybe NVIDIA is aiming for servers and the like here, not the mainstream market. So the flawless support for Windows and drivers and their own GPUs for gamers etc is less of a concern? Fascinating developments though... we would all benefit from chipsets converging towards a similar architecture.
- karteum 3y agoBy the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver : "Project Denver was originally intended to support both ARM and x86 code using code morphing technology from Transmeta, but was changed to the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set because Nvidia could not obtain a license to Intel's patents"
- exabrial 3y agoI really want a sever with the absurd memory bandwidth/latency that an m1/m2 have. Just not a lot of benchmarks here that reflect what happens in the real world unfortunately
- namelosw 3y agoIt seems Nvidia was trying to unify cloud computing (GPU + CPU + whatever-PU), and put those beasts in data centres. Is this "PC" processor still aiming for data centres or desktops? It's not surprising at all if it's the former one.
- prettywoman 3y ago[dead]
- seec 3y agoI wouldn't hold my breath too much. Before even talking about software and backward compatibility which is quite important for windows users (at least the one who are going to buy at high price/margins) it must be competitive from a performance standpoint. If we look at what Apple has done with their ARM chips, outside of power consumption they rarely win on performance. It is mostly software optimized to use their specialized hardware compute block that get any advantage from Apple Silicon. Their ARM CPU are not that special, especially since they make it hard to sort CPU from GPU and other hardware co-processor. When you go look in detail in the various benchmark numbers you realize the CPU part performs at most like a mid-range laptop CPU. And their GPU (that gets used to "win" some CPU benchmark) is weak when you consider the price but admittedly that is not going to be a problem for NVidia. People say Apple successfully transitioned but it is mostly because they leave no choice to their customers. In other words, they do not have to compete. I doubt they would have sold much Apple Silicon desktop if those were to compete with equivalent Intel + dGPU machines; particularly considering the price premium. Compared to the golden iMac era, it seems like they do not sell much of them in the first place, and it sort of makes my argument. NVidia will not have this luxury that Apple has. They will have to compete on both performance and price. Apple did not really succeed; I doubt they will. But maybe their chip designers are so much better than Apple's or less focus on power consumption will allow them to unlock more performance from ARM. But this is old history, and it seems to just repeat itself. Apple just went back to their Motorola "G" days where they pretend that they are competitive but in fact when you do run software that exists cross platform and is not unfairly optimized for the Apple platform it is rarely true. NVidia won't be able to create a marketing spin around this and still sell their stuff at a massive premium. It is unlikely that PCs will switch to ARM because there are not that many benefits but quite a bit of hassle and cost involved. It is like the rotary engine that has some advantages over traditional piston engines but in the end are very rarely worth the tradeoffs which is why it is stuck in niche applications (at best, mostly unused actually).