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

reuters.com

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

#11

Post by pjmlp »

pseudosavant wrote: post #8

I hope these ARM chips are Apple-level ARM designs. Apple has an ARM license that allows them to completely design their own cores. Only Apple's ARM designs have cutting edge performance. Everyone else (Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) uses stock, or nearly stock, ARM designs off-the-shelf that, performance-wise, aren't at all competitive with AMD/Intel. I'd love a Surface Pro with an M1/M2 chip, but the Qualcomm ARM chips ar…

First step is convincing Windows development community that Windows on ARM actually matters.

Until then, whatever Apple has over 80% of the worldwide desktop market hardly matters.

And after how UWP was managed, there aren't that many that care.

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

#12

Post by pseudosavant »

vsskanth wrote: post #10

Why is it taking so long to launch competitive ARM Windows laptops ? Apple is already in it's third iteration of the M series and there's still no proper competition to the Macbooks.

Because the best chip designs in the world are made by Apple, Intel, and AMD. ARM's chip designs are years behind those three. Apple has shown ARM can have excellent performance, but they are the only ones to do it so far. Android users have shown that they don't care about buying new phones with CPUs that are slower than 3-year-old iPhones.

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

#13

Post by brucethemoose2 »

pseudosavant wrote: post #8

I hope these ARM chips are Apple-level ARM designs. Apple has an ARM license that allows them to completely design their own cores. Only Apple's ARM designs have cutting edge performance. Everyone else (Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) uses stock, or nearly stock, ARM designs off-the-shelf that, performance-wise, aren't at all competitive with AMD/Intel. I'd love a Surface Pro with an M1/M2 chip, but the Qualcomm ARM chips ar…

The problem with the current Qualcomm cores is that they are cheap and low power, but the new Nuvia cores should alleviate this.

...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.

Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.

Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.

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

#14

Post by smoldesu »

bhouston wrote: post #5
EternalUsenet wrote: post #2

I do wonder if we will see these chips available for purchase to install in standard form factor ATX style systems? This is something I haven’t seen Arm crack into yet.

I think ATX style machines are very niche. Gamers love them and 3D artsits, but outside of that I think no one wants them anymore. I think that ARM-compatibility for games in the near term is a hard sell (although Blender, Maya, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro have been ported to ARM for running on Apple chips.) I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company…

Nvidia should really be able to do both. Their integrated solutions like Orin scale up to a certain point, but the demand for modular compute is still enormous on the server side (and enthusiast market). Given that CUDA will support both going forward, I don't think there's a technical incentive to kill the market.

My guess is that Nvidia will have a line of mobile cores/chipsets for integrators that want them, while also offering PCI-enabled boards for gamers and enthusiasts. Even Apple can't outrun the demand for a PCI-enabled machine, and they don't even support eGPUs. Nvidia's incentive to abandon ATX (or at least modularity) is even slimmer.

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

#15

Post by ZiiS »

guerrilla wrote: post #7

I hope so. Then I can put some weird OS on it that nobody uses because I really miss the security-through-obscurity I got back in the day running Linux on PowerPC before either were popular. Nobody was going to bother writing shellcode for that shit back then :P

A linux kernel on Arm is by far the widest deployed pairing in history.

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

#16

Post by dmitrygr »

vsskanth wrote: post #10

Why is it taking so long to launch competitive ARM Windows laptops ? Apple is already in it's third iteration of the M series and there's still no proper competition to the Macbooks.

Everyone but apple uses ARM-designed cores. Why are ARM-designed cores behind? Go check what the comp is for a CPU designer at apple, and then go check what it is at ARM. Suddenly, you'll be overcome with a feeling of clarity.

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

#18

Post by timschmidt »

bhouston wrote: post #3

Given how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.

We've had them direct from Intel since at least 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing

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

#19

Post by brucethemoose2 »

bhouston wrote: post #3

Given how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.

We can get that with x86.

We just don't, because it's cheaper to clock the chips higher and burn more power, and to keep large graphics seperate from the CPU.

Intel's/AMD's attempts at addressing this (Broadwell/Skylake with eDRAM, Vega M, AMD's Van Gogh and Dragon Crest) were universally shot down by laptop OEMs. I don't know why, but they were probably just being cheap.

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

#20

Post by nerdjon »

> Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers.

I know that Mac was always in single digit marketshare (but still a healthy amount as far as money for apple goes) but still doubling seems to be quite an achievement?

I am curious if this is actually from an increase in Mac sales or a decrease in PC sales and Mac has just been stable? Or a mix of both. I will need to look this up. (Side note: I HATE when we see something as unhelpful as "doubled" and they could have included some numbers at least).

On the topic of the article, I was kinda surprised to see that Microsoft has some initiates for Windows on Arm. I know it was technically a thing but it seemed like a thing that we just stopped hearing about?

Do they have an answer to rosetta so the transition can be mostly seamless (for everyone except developers if the M series is any indication...).

Also I have to wonder how much pre-built Windows computers are still sold vs moving to non traditional platforms like an iPad?

I am curious because gaming will likely never move to arm. Unless I have missed it I have never seen ARM in a system that you can build yourself. Even Apple's ARM Mac Pro is questionably "Customizable" after the fact. I just don't see most PC gamers giving up the upgradability.

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