NVIDIA Announces Grace CPU For ARM-Based AI/HPC Processor

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After pondering a bit more about Nvida's announcement at GTC that they are partnering with Mediatek to bring RTX Ampere GPUs to Mediatek' ARM SoCs it does make some sense. I think Nvidia ALSO sees the Age of ARM happening and also saw themselves getting squeezed out of the ARM consumer market.

Apple has their own GPU IP and Core for their ARM based M1. Qualcomm has long had their ATI based IP and GPU core called Adreno (an anagram of "Radeon"). Samsung is now licensing RDNA IP from AMD for new GPU cores for Samsung's Exnyos ARM based SoCs. Which, by the way, may show up this Fall in Google's custom ARM SoC, code named "Whitechapel" which will debut in the upcoming Pixel 6. And Broadcom tends to just go with ARM's own Mali GPU.

So that leaves Nvidia with little choice but to go with Mediatek. But as Mediatek sells more ARM based SoCs than anyone else, even Qualcomm, it's not a bad deal for Nvidia to get into the ARM consumer world as they are in the x86 world.

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More details from Nvidia's GTC event on it's partnership with Mediatek. Nividia straight up says that they are going to expand the ARM eco-system to PC desktops as well as laptops.

The Age of ARM is truly and verifiably here.

" About halfway through his presentation, Huang presented a slide entitled "Expanding Arm Ecosystem Beyond Mobile," which mentioned MediaTek's collaboration. According to NVIDIA, it will be licensing its GeForce RTX 30 Ampere IP for use in MediaTek MT819x SoCs. "

"We're announcing a partnership with MediaTek to create a reference system and SDK for Chrome OS and Linux PCs," said Huang during the presentation. "MediaTek is the world's largest SoC maker. Combining NVIDIA GPUs and MediaTek SoCs will make excellent PCs and notebooks."

" While we might be most familiar with Ampere in desktop and laptop applications (where it draws a considerable amount of power), Ampere can also be scaled down for low-power situations. We see this with NVIDIA's Orin SoC which includes Hercules Arm CPUs and Ampere GPUs in a TDP ranging from 5 to 45 watts. "

https://hothardware.com/news/future-mediatek-arm-socs-to-leverage-geforce-rtx-gpus-for-chromebooks

[numacross]

That is not quite right.

https://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/products/sockets/bga-sockets.html

All BGA products can be put in a socket. Is is a common produced AMD socket no its not. Are all systems with a A1100 inside BGA soldered on the answer some do have third party sockets. Yes there are through hole designs for the A1100 for test boards as to mount a BGA socket though hole is way better than surface mount pads.

Think about it there are times you want to validate chips function before they get exposed to the heat of soldering so you can work out if a problem is because of your soldering process or if you have got a lemon batch for some reason.

People incorrectly presume just because something is BGA packaged that it does not have socket. 99% of everything that is BGA has a socket for making chip testing boards. Socket costs more money and requires more PCB space than using the BGA soldered on.

Of course there are sockets able to take BGA chips, but as you said they are mainly used for development and testing since they are quite expensive. The bigger ones are actually prohibitively expensive due to the torque tooling used in them.

[coder]

Nvidia and Mediatek announced today a partnership to bring Nvidia RTX GPUs to Mediatek ARM based SoCs.

This is basically like how Samsung licensed RNDA from AMD.

Also, it's one of the likely outcomes people were talking about, when the Nvidia/ARM acquisition got announced. For ARM customers using Mali GPUs, it's probably now a much shorter step to upgrade to a Nvidia-designed unit.

It also sounds like it brings decent ARM mini-PCs a step closer.

[oiaohm]

The A1100 is not socketable, it's BGA

That is not quite right.

https://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/products/sockets/bga-sockets.html

All BGA products can be put in a socket. Is is a common produced AMD socket no its not. Are all systems with a A1100 inside BGA soldered on the answer some do have third party sockets. Yes there are through hole designs for the A1100 for test boards as to mount a BGA socket though hole is way better than surface mount pads.

Think about it there are times you want to validate chips function before they get exposed to the heat of soldering so you can work out if a problem is because of your soldering process or if you have got a lemon batch for some reason.

People incorrectly presume just because something is BGA packaged that it does not have socket. 99% of everything that is BGA has a socket for making chip testing boards. Socket costs more money and requires more PCB space than using the BGA soldered on.

[angrypie]

The ARM shilling in this forum is getting annoying.

NVIDIA wants to lock everyone in and keep competitors out by ignoring industry standards. There's nothing commendable about this disgrace.

[Jumbotron]

Well...WELL !! The AGE of ARM ( with Nvidia at the helm ) just got a WHOLE LOT more interesting !!

Nvidia and Mediatek announced today a partnership to bring Nvidia RTX GPUs to Mediatek ARM based SoCs.

" According to the announcement, the two companies are partnering to create a “reference platform” that supports “Chromium, Linux, and NVIDIA SDKs.” More specifically, MediaTek’s Arm-based systems on a chip (SoCs) will be combined with Nvidia’s RTX GPUs to bring ray-tracing graphics and more to Chromebooks.

MediaTek is the world’s largest supplier of Arm chips, used to power everything from smartphones, Chromebooks, and smart TVs. We look forward to using our technology and working with NVIDIA to bring the power of GPUs to the Arm PC platform for gaming, content creation, and much more. GPU acceleration will be a huge boost for the entire Arm ecosystem.

Rick Tsai, CEO, MediaTek "

https://9to5google.com/2021/04/13/me...x-chromebooks/

[piotrj3]

I think that's not what they meant. I imagine they had in mind that one OS kernel should be managing hybrid ISA CPU cores, which share a global pool of RAM. This would be an interesting project, but I'm not sure we really have anything like it, today.

That sounds horrible to code in and extremly challenging to compiler. Honestly CUDA more behaves like that already.

[piotrj3]

There are knowledgeble folks who would sincerely disagree on the latter point, as well as whether ARM is really even RISC. Rather than take a position on that, I just want to point out that the advantages of AArch64 include:

• simpler ISA -> simpler, more energy-efficient decoder
• fixed-sized instruction word -> wider front-end
• larger GP register file -> less spilling
• relaxed memory-consistency -> greater instruction-reordering flexibility

These are undeniable, though you can certainly debate the impact each has on performance.

I meant more that CPUs internally are more RISC in nature, as big intstructions always gets decoded into smaller very simple RISC like instructions and go onto pipeline. X86 by itself or newer ARM architectures are not by itself RISC.

[Jumbotron]

This is the first time, in a while, that I've seen that reference. Does anyone have a link to a clear description of "The Machine"? I'm not looking for marketing BS.

Ahhh...here we go. Full rundown of HP's "The Machine" with pix, diagrams, etc. of all major components from the SoC, memory pools, data connections both copper and fiber optic, data and interface planes, rack sleds, pretty much a entire tear down of The Machine. Also, and I had forgotten this The Machine was based off of an undisclosed ARM SoC called the "Workload Processor". Also the interconnects inside and outside The Machine was Gen Z. Yeah...that Gen Z which will be working with the CXL coalition in tying up racks of CPUs, GPU, and external Memory pools in the next year or two.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/01/09/hpe-powers-machine-architecture/