nVidia and AMD to make PC Arm chips

Cmaier

Cmaier

Site Master
Staff Member
Site Donor
Joined
Sep 26, 2021
Posts
6,115
Main Camera
Sony
www.reuters.com

Exclusive: Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel

Nvidia dominates the market for AI computing chips. Now it is coming after Intel’s longtime stronghold.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

Article is mostly about nVidia, but they really aren’t very good at making CPUs, and unless something has changed, their whole design methodology is wrong. AMD knows what they are doing, however, and I expect that they will make some formidable chips.
 
I find the prospect of Nvidia pairing Arm’s CPU IP with their GPUs most exciting.

Nvidia doesn’t half-ass the software side. It will no doubt have rock-solid drivers at launch and a wide range of software updated to support it. Expect applications like Blender and popular AAAs flying on these things on day one.

I trust Nvidia to deliver a polished, first class experience… but not so much AMD.
 
Cmaier said:
www.reuters.com

Exclusive: Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel

Nvidia dominates the market for AI computing chips. Now it is coming after Intel’s longtime stronghold.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

Article is mostly about nVidia, but they really aren’t very good at making CPUs, and unless something has changed, their whole design methodology is wrong. AMD knows what they are doing, however, and I expect that they will make some formidable chips.
Click to expand...
They also don’t say who will be designing their own cores, just that they’ll be designing their own CPUs which could mean just designing the SOC. While even just using off the shelf ARM designs (at first) would be a massive step for AMD, NVIDIA is already doing that for data center, it’s also not clear from this article yet what products AMD be aiming for. Still massive news if a little vague about details.
 
Cmaier said:
This article is ridiculous:

9to5mac.com

Qualcomm's latest CPU beats Apple's M1 and catches up with M2

Apple has been doing a great job with its Apple Silicon “M” chips for computers, as they deliver more performance...
9to5mac.com 9to5mac.com

Look at the per-core speeds and then look at the headline.
Click to expand...
Yeah that’s a pretty dubious assertion given those numbers. It’s got a closer to M2 Pro design than M2. We’ll have to see what it’s power draw is but especially single core score is uhhh … not great which is rather more important for this product segment than Nuvia’s original goal of server design. I’m pretty sure though even then that single core score isn’t what they promised with their “simulated” design back in the day. But you already savaged that in a different post.
 
Cmaier said:
This article is ridiculous:

9to5mac.com

Qualcomm's latest CPU beats Apple's M1 and catches up with M2

Apple has been doing a great job with its Apple Silicon “M” chips for computers, as they deliver more performance...
9to5mac.com 9to5mac.com

Look at the per-core speeds and then look at the headline.
Click to expand...
Holy 💩, the Geekbench 5 single core score is awful

Qualcomm CRD - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Qualcomm CRD with an Intel Pentium II/III processor.
browser.geekbench.com

There must be a problem with the test system - the performance cores can’t be that bad, surely 😬

It’s only competing with A12X https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21859127?baseline=21742445
 
nVidia has that wacky Grace/Hopper datacenter thing, so they have something of a leg up. How Grace architecture would perform at the non-server level, though, is not at all clear.
 
Aaronage said:
Holy 💩, the Geekbench 5 single core score is awful

Qualcomm CRD - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Qualcomm CRD with an Intel Pentium II/III processor.
browser.geekbench.com

There must be a problem with the test system - the performance cores can’t be that bad, surely 😬

It’s only competing with A12X https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21859127?baseline=21742445
Click to expand...
I’m pretty sure their marketing material from before the buyout was promising better than M1 SC performance.
 
Cmaier said:
This article is ridiculous:

9to5mac.com

Qualcomm's latest CPU beats Apple's M1 and catches up with M2

Apple has been doing a great job with its Apple Silicon “M” chips for computers, as they deliver more performance...
9to5mac.com 9to5mac.com

Look at the per-core speeds and then look at the headline.
Click to expand...
One of the worst articles I’ve ever seen. Authors clearly have no idea what they are talking about. They are claiming the gen 4 is slower than the gen 2??? I mean I guess it could be an early prototype but it’s nothing to boast about.

I think Qualcomm has an event tomorrow and amusingly, Gerard Williams has created a forum account at Anandtech seemingly.
 
Re: the Geekbench result

If we assume the reported frequency is correct and scale up to 4.2GHz (the supposed max boost clock), it will just barely match an M1 in single core performance (~1675 points)

That would be pretty embarrassing as Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with Cortex X4 at 3.2GHz is also coming in roughly the same as M1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21861210

So… Arm managed to get M1 P-core performance at the same frequency as M1 on a similar process node to M1 with (presumably) the same if not better efficiency as M1… but it looks like Qualcomm/Nuvia only managed to get M1 performance at much higher frequency and (presumably) power draw? 😅 I guess we’ll see soonish.
 
KingOfPain said:
Give that it is almost Halloween, they could call the architecture K12 Resurrected...

AMD K12 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
If nobody at AMD wants to do an Arm chip, I’m happy to go back there and do it. I bet I could get a few more former team members to join, too, if they promise to leave us alone until the chip tapes out.
 
exoticspice1 said:
its running under x86 emumation. Notice the name of the CPU says intel.
Click to expand...
Could be … however it says specifically Intel pentium 2/3. Is that what Qualcomm chips read as under emulation? It could also just not be reading the cpu name right as this is pre-release for a brand new processor. With pre-release “leaks” especially there could be a hundred different explanations for a given score. But even so, not a great first impression.
 
Jimmyjames said:
One of the worst articles I’ve ever seen. Authors clearly have no idea what they are talking about. They are claiming the gen 4 is slower than the gen 2??? I mean I guess it could be an early prototype but it’s nothing to boast about.

I think Qualcomm has an event tomorrow and amusingly, Gerard Williams has created a forum account at Anandtech seemingly.
Click to expand...
I think the article might be also mixing GB6 and GB5 scores … those M-series scores are GB6. This is a GB5 score.
 
Aaronage said:
Re: the Geekbench result

If we assume the reported frequency is correct and scale up to 4.2GHz (the supposed max boost clock), it will just barely match an M1 in single core performance (~1675 points)

That would be pretty embarrassing as Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with Cortex X4 at 3.2GHz is also coming in roughly the same as M1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21861210

So… Arm managed to get M1 P-core performance at the same frequency as M1 on a similar process node to M1 with (presumably) the same if not better efficiency as M1… but it looks like Qualcomm/Nuvia only managed to get M1 performance at much higher frequency and (presumably) power draw? 😅 I guess we’ll see soonish.
Click to expand...
Unclear: that is labeled as the base clock but that doesn’t mean that’s the clock it ran at - we don’t know what boost clock it was allowed to go to during the test. Lot’s of unknowns.
 
dada_dave said:
Could be … however it says specifically Intel pentium 2/3. Is that what Qualcomm chips read as under emulation?
Click to expand...
That prettymuch has to be the case. It says "12 cores" which would be a large mbd with a dozen PII/IIIs on it with elaborate bus management, because all the PII/IIIs were single core. Also, those would all be 32-bit processors, which do not really appear at all even in GB5.
 

Similar threads

A
MediaTek and Nvidia cooperating on a high-end Arm PC chip
Replies
8
Views
249
KingOfPain
KingOfPain
T
ARM-based NVIDIA Grace server chip with 500 GB/s UMA claims lower power and higher performance than competing Intel & AMD designs
2
Replies
32
Views
2K
mr_roboto
M
Back
Top