Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

nextplatform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–18 of 18 posts

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#11

Post by floatboth »

gumby wrote: post #8
_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.

In many cases dramatically so (and I say this as someone who doesn't even like x86 much). It depends on your application. For small embedded applications where things like BOM or electrical power massively dominate, neither x86 or ARM is worth it (and this is in a world where you can get a small ARM for less than a dollar -- we're talking about CPUs that cost pennies in volume). For pretty much every "mobile" applica…

It's not just supercomputing.

There's a push for networking chips (ones with built-in multi-gigabit NICs): Mellanox Bluefield, NXP Layerscape [the one that's in the new SolidRun workstation!]..

And for regular old server chips (or "cloud" in marketing speak): Ampere eMAG, Amazon Graviton..

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#12

Post by opencl »

_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.

There is no power efficiency advantage in today's actual high performance ARM chips. See the Cavium ThunderX2 server chips: their dual socket x 32 core system is generally slower[1] (though it is faster in a couple of benchmarks) and draws more power than similarly configured x86 servers[2].

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/cavium-thunderx2-review-benchma...

[2] https://www.servethehome.com/updated-cavium-thunderx2-power-...

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#14

Post by blu42 »

yep_thats_right wrote: post #6
_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.

I'm also curious how fellow HNers think x86 will fare in the next 10, 20, 30 years. Will we still be using x86 as the most common option in laptops by then?

FWIW, all my laptops are currently arm-based (chromebooks), for the simple reason of price + battery performance.

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#15

Post by gumby »

floatboth wrote: post #11
gumby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases dramatically so (and I say this as someone who doesn't even like x86 much). It depends on your application. For small embedded applications where things like BOM or electrical power massively dominate, neither x86 or ARM is worth it (and this is in a world where you can get a small ARM for less than a dollar -- we're talking about CPUs that cost pennies in volume). For pretty much every "mobile" applica…

It's not just supercomputing. There's a push for networking chips (ones with built-in multi-gigabit NICs): Mellanox Bluefield, NXP Layerscape [the one that's in the new SolidRun workstation!].. And for regular old server chips (or "cloud" in marketing speak): Ampere eMAG, Amazon Graviton..

networking chips typically won't have the kind of workload I was talking about so are a natural for an ARM or MIPS (or someday I hope RISC-V) device. x86 is just too expensive and Intel long abandoned (for economic reasons) the lifetime guarantees needed for such devices.

There are some server experiments but they are a long way from mainstream. You'd think they might be fine for microservices but if you're AWS it's better to share a lot of VMs because the CPU cost doesn't dominate. Someday I hope.

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#16

Post by polotics »

ksec wrote: post #13
rbirkby wrote: post #4

“There are no GPUs in this system because there are no European makers of GPUs” Cough cough. Mali. Imagination. Even Apple.

Well, I guess they count Mali ( ARM ) and IMG as UK and not EU ?

Last I checked, Europe is a continent, not a bureaucracy.

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#17

Post by imtringued »

_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.

Yeah x86 has vendors that don't absolutely despise opensource software.

Re: Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration

#18

Post by floatboth »

gumby wrote: post #15
floatboth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just supercomputing. There's a push for networking chips (ones with built-in multi-gigabit NICs): Mellanox Bluefield, NXP Layerscape [the one that's in the new SolidRun workstation!].. And for regular old server chips (or "cloud" in marketing speak): Ampere eMAG, Amazon Graviton..

networking chips typically won't have the kind of workload I was talking about so are a natural for an ARM or MIPS (or someday I hope RISC-V) device. x86 is just too expensive and Intel long abandoned (for economic reasons) the lifetime guarantees needed for such devices. There are some server experiments but they are a long way from mainstream. You'd think they might be fine for microservices but if you're AWS it's…

AWS is putting a lot of VMs on their 16-core Cortex-A72 chips :)
Post reply on HN