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Nvidia Grace CPU

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Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#151

Post by ekianjo »

Gigachad wrote: post #88
andrewstuart wrote: post #76

This leads me to wonder about the microprocessor shortage. So many computing devices such as Nvidia Jetson and Raspberry Pi are simply not available anywhere. I wonder what's he point of bringing out new products when existing products can't be purchased? Won't the new products also simply not be available?

The products don't get produced in order. The high value products get priority and continuously bump out low value chips like those on the RPI. Not sure what the cost of this Grace chip is but it looks to be targeting high value users so it gets priority. Notice how there is no shortage of chips for iPhones, because Apple just buys the capacity at whatever cost it takes.

> The high value products get priority

So GPUs are not high priority? Because they are out of stock pretty much everywhere too.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#152

Post by ekianjo »

singlow wrote: post #86
aftbit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference? If they are perpetually sold out, then they cannot be purchased.

There is constant production and deliveries being made, just no standing inventory.

Can you enter a queue to purchase them? If not it's just a cat and mouse game to get one.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#153

Post by jiggawatts »

bullen wrote: post #100
cma wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you are ignoring use cases where all cores read shared data, but rarely contentiously write to it. You should get much more read bandwidth and latency than over a network.

Sure, but my point is: why cram more and more cores into the same SoC if they can't talk to each other more efficiently than separate computers over ethernet?

Latency! Nanoseconds versus microseconds or even milliseconds makes a huge difference.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#154

Post by bick_nyers »

ekianjo wrote: post #151
Gigachad wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The products don't get produced in order. The high value products get priority and continuously bump out low value chips like those on the RPI. Not sure what the cost of this Grace chip is but it looks to be targeting high value users so it gets priority. Notice how there is no shortage of chips for iPhones, because Apple just buys the capacity at whatever cost it takes.

> The high value products get priority So GPUs are not high priority? Because they are out of stock pretty much everywhere too.

It's been pretty easy to buy a 3090 for a while now, and the rest of the 30 series is finally starting to stabilize thankfully

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#155

Post by singlow »

ekianjo wrote: post #152
singlow wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is constant production and deliveries being made, just no standing inventory.

Can you enter a queue to purchase them? If not it's just a cat and mouse game to get one.

As a consumer you may not be able to, but volume customers and distributors are ordering them and waiting for them.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#156

Post by zucker42 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #76

This leads me to wonder about the microprocessor shortage. So many computing devices such as Nvidia Jetson and Raspberry Pi are simply not available anywhere. I wonder what's he point of bringing out new products when existing products can't be purchased? Won't the new products also simply not be available?

Chip production is not completely fungible.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#157

Post by pastaguy1 »

michaelt wrote: post #112
tyrfing wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discrete GPUs have historically been a relatively small and volatile niche compared to CPUs, it's only in the last few years that the market has seen extreme growth. edit: the market pretty much went from gaming as the primary pillar to gaming + HPC, which makes it far more attractive since you'd expect it to be much less cyclical and less price sensitive. Raja Koduri was hired in late 2017 to work on GPU related stu…

CUDA came out in 2007. Wikipedia puts the start of the GPU-driven 'deep learning revolution' in 2012 [1] and people have been putting GPUs into their supercomputers since 2012 as well [2] I find it strange that Intel has basically just left the entire market to nvidia, despite having 10-15 years warning and running their own GPU division the whole time . [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Deep_learning_r…

They tried to check many, some, maybe possibly more of the boxes with the Xeon Phi, and it kinda seems like things simply didn't go their way.

Cuda wasn't as flexible, and the payoff wasn't as big in 2010 or so as it is now.

I've never used a phi, but i can see where they were coming from i think. No need for a full rewrite like Cuda (maybe). The hardware is also more flexible than a GPU, but that turned out to be less important than they thought it might be.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#158

Post by simondotau »

messe wrote: post #35
ksec wrote: post #5

This is interesting. So without actually targeting a specific Cloud / server market for their CPU, which often ends with a chicken and egg problem with HyperScaler making their own Design or Chip. Nvidia manage to enter the Server CPU market leveraging their GPU and AI workload. All of a sudden there is real choice of ARM CPU on Server. ( What will happen to Ampere ? ) The LPDDR5X used here will also be the first to…

I wonder if Apple also intends to introduce ECC LPDDR5 on the Mac Pro. Other than additional expansion, I’m struggling to see what else they can add to distinguish it from the Mac Studio.

In order for an Apple Silicon Mac Pro to make any sense whatsoever, its SOC will need have to have support for off-package memory and substantially more PCI-E lanes than the M1 Ultra. Therefore it seems all but certain to me that it will debut the M2 chip family.

Apple isn't going to give up the substantial performance benefits of on-package unified memory in order to support DIMMs. Therefore I predict that we'll see a two-tier memory architecture with the OS making automated decisions based on memory pressure, as well as new APIs to allocate memory with a preference for capacity or performance.

The chassis design is new enough that it was designed with an eventual Apple Silicon Mac Pro in mind, so I expect to see minimal change to the exterior. It might shrink and have fewer slots (particularly since most users won't need a slotted GPU) though I think that's unlikely given that its height and width was defined by 5U rack dimensions.

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#159

Post by simondotau »

lostlogin wrote: post #54
MBCook wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More cores and more RAM is really kind of it. I guess PCIe but I’m kind of wondering if they’ll do that.

And more worryingly, will a GPU function in the slots. The questions everyone has, Ram and GPU.

I think support for GPU compute has reasonable odds. I'd place worse odds on GPU support for back-end graphics rendering or display driving. And of course support for any Nvidia card would continue to have very poor odds.

Heck, we're talking about a company that put an A13 into a monitor. I wouldn't put it past Apple to put an M2 Ultra onto MPX modules and have that GPU/ANE compute performance automatically available through existing APIs. (Would be a great way to bin M2 Ultra chips with a failed CPU core.)

Re: Nvidia Grace CPU

#160

Post by ksec »

andrewstuart wrote: post #76

This leads me to wonder about the microprocessor shortage. So many computing devices such as Nvidia Jetson and Raspberry Pi are simply not available anywhere. I wonder what's he point of bringing out new products when existing products can't be purchased? Won't the new products also simply not be available?

>Won't the new products also simply not be available?

There are shortage in low end, high NM, mature node. This is on 4nm leading node.

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