Nvidia promises annual updates across CPU, GPU, DPU lines

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Nvidia wants to lure you to the Arm side with fresh server bait

GPU giant promises big advancements with Arm-based Grace CPU, says the software is ready

Dylan Martin Fri 17 Jun 2022 // 19:17 UTC

Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.
Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.
The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.

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Nvidia taps Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPU for Hopper-powered DGX H100

A win against AMD as a much bigger war over AI compute plays out

Dylan Martin Tue 7 Jun 2022 // 19:30 UTC

Nvidia has chosen Intel's next-generation Xeon Scalable processor, known as Sapphire Rapids, to go inside its upcoming DGX H100 AI system to showcase its flagship H100 GPU.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, confirmed the CPU choice during a fireside chat Tuesday at the BofA Securities 2022 Global Technology Conference. Nvidia positions the DGX family as the premier vehicle for its datacenter GPUs, pre-loading the machines with its software and optimizing them to provide the fastest AI performance as individual systems or in large supercomputer clusters.
Huang's confirmation answers a question we and other observers have had about which next-generation x86 server CPU the new DGX system would use since it was announced in March.

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AMD touts big datacenter, AI ambitions in CPU-GPU roadmap

Epyc future ahead, along with Instinct, Ryzen, Radeon and custom chip push

Dylan Martin Fri 10 Jun 2022 // 01:58 UTC

After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.
These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.
"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."

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Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

The chip’s GPU and neural engine could overshadow Apple’s concession on CPU performance

Dylan Martin Fri 10 Jun 2022 // 20:27 UTC

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.
During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.
Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

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Lenovo reveals small but mighty desktop workstation

ThinkStation P360 Ultra packs latest Intel Core processor, Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU, support for eight monitors

Dan Robinson Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 17:14 UTC

Lenovo has unveiled a small desktop workstation in a new physical format that's smaller than previous compact designs, but which it claims still has the type of performance professional users require.
Available from the end of this month, the ThinkStation P360 Ultra comes in a chassis that is less than 4 liters in total volume, but packs in 12th Gen Intel Core processors – that's the latest Alder Lake generation with up to 16 cores, but not the Xeon chips that we would expect to see in a workstation – and an Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU.
Other specifications include up to 128GB of DDR5 memory, two PCIe 4.0 slots, up to 8TB of storage using plug-in M.2 cards, plus dual Ethernet and Thunderbolt 4 ports, and support for up to eight displays, the latter of which will please many professional users. Pricing is expected to start at $1,299 in the US.

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Arm jumps on ray tracing bandwagon with beefy GPU design

British chip designer’s reveal comes months after mobile RT moves by AMD, Imagination

Dylan Martin Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 15:00 UTC

Arm is beefing up its role in the rapidly-evolving (yet long-standing) hardware-based real-time ray tracing arena.
The company revealed on Tuesday that it will introduce the feature in its new flagship Immortalis-G715 GPU design for smartphones, promising to deliver graphics in mobile games that realistically recreate the way light interacts with objects.
Arm is promoting the Immortalis-G715 as its best mobile GPU design yet, claiming that it will provide 15 percent faster performance and 15 percent better energy efficiency compared to the currently available Mali-G710.

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Arm says its Cortex-X3 CPU smokes this Intel laptop silicon

Chip design house reveals brains of what might be your next ultralight notebook

Dylan Martin Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 18:35 UTC

Arm has at least one of Intel's more capable mainstream laptop processors in mind with its Cortex-X3 CPU design.
The British outfit said the X3, revealed Tuesday alongside other CPU and GPU blueprints, is expected to provide an estimated 34 percent higher peak performance than a performance core in Intel's upper mid-range Core i7-1260P processor from this year.
Arm came to that conclusion, mind you, after running the SPECRate2017_int_base single-threaded benchmark in a simulation of its CPU core design clocked at an equivalent to 3.6GHz with 1MB of L2 and 16MB of L3 cache.

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AMD’s AI strategy comes into view with Xilinx, GPU, software plans

Chip designer hopes to have broad inference and training coverage from the edge to the cloud

Dylan Martin Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 19:30 UTC

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.
It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.
But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

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Linux Foundation thinks it can get you interested in smartNICs

Step one: Make them easier to program

Tobias Mann Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 11:00 UTC

The Linux Foundation wants to make data processing units (DPUs) easier to deploy, with the launch of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project this week.
The program has already garnered support from several leading chipmakers, systems builders, and software vendors – Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, F5, Keysight, Dell Tech, and Red Hat to name a few – and promises to build an open ecosystem of common software frameworks that can run on any DPU or smartNIC.
SmartNICs, DPUs, IPUs – whatever you prefer to call them – have been used in cloud and hyperscale datacenters for years now. The devices typically feature onboard networking in a PCIe card form factor and are designed to offload and accelerate I/O-intensive processes and virtualization functions that would otherwise consume valuable host CPU resources.

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AMD to end Threadripper Pro 5000 drought for non-Lenovo PCs

As the House of Zen kills off consumer-friendly non-Pro TR chips

Dylan Martin Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 23:00 UTC

A drought of AMD's latest Threadripper workstation processors is finally coming to an end for PC makers who faced shortages earlier this year all while Hong Kong giant Lenovo enjoyed an exclusive supply of the chips.
AMD announced on Monday it will expand availability of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs to "leading" system integrators in July and to DIY builders through retailers later this year. This announcement came nearly two weeks after Dell announced it would release a workstation with Threadripper Pro 5000 in the summer.
The coming wave of Threadripper Pro 5000 workstations will mark an end to the exclusivity window Lenovo had with the high-performance chips since they launched in April.

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