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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

#41

Post by MenhirMike »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #13
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 dis…

Didn't they also lose one of their key employees? That was arguably in 2019, before the M1 came out, so I don't know how much of an impact Gerard Williams actually had, but I do wonder if they can keep the team together.

(Edit: Just googled, Gerard Williams is now at Nuvia and in the middle of a lawsuit with Apple)

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

#42

Post by brucethemoose2 »

nerdjon wrote: post #20

> 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…

> gaming will likely never move to arm.

Oh, it can if Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft push it.

Most of the back catalog can probably run fine emulated, though you may want to stick to x86 for those older CPU bound sim games that aren't going to get a recompile.

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

#43

Post by bhouston »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #19
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.

I had the NUC with Vega M, the so called Hades Canyon, and it was awesome. Pricy but awesome. It was my media and gaming PC in the living room. For a while it was also the VR machine too with Steam-based VR working great.

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

#44

Post by minedwiz »

frandroid wrote: post #34
nerdjon wrote: post #20

> 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…

You stopped hearing about it because the chips Qualcomm made were dreadful.

IIRC ARM64 Windows running in a VM on Mac greatly exceeded performance on native windows hardware with those qcom chips.

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

#45

Post by nicoburns »

eslaught wrote: post #33
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.

Let's not exaggerate here. I've got the M2 Pro Mac Mini, and it is nearly silent, but depending on your workload you still generate nontrivial heat and the fans do need to run to keep it cool. Maybe I notice more because I build a lot of software, but this is not some magic bullet that avoids the need for traditional heat management.

Very much dependant on your workload. At least on my M1 Pro MacBook. I spend my day doing JavaScript and Rust dev and the fans spin up maybe once every few weeks. Usually when a process is accidentally in an infinite loop and consuming far more resources than it should. Occasionally when I need to compile something really big. And it only gets warm when I use it on my bed leaving it with no airflow at all.

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

#46

Post by brucethemoose2 »

mattpavelle wrote: post #21
timschmidt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except OP said, "combined with great graphics performances" - the NUCs never had good graphics performance ... and their CPU performance was actually not that great either.

eDRAM Broadwell was respectable.

Unsurprisingly, Intel made it for Apple, and they were pretty much the only OEM that used it.

Anyway, I think Intel sold some NUCs with them, but they were very expensive.

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

#48

Post by zokier »

MenhirMike wrote: post #38
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #9

> Nvidia has quietly begun designing central processing units (CPUs) that would run Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Windows operating system... > Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology... > Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip.. (That would be the Nuvia core, I assume) Really, just read the whole thing. Its a brief but juicy report. Anyway, I wonder if Nvidia i…

> Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology Technically, the Platform Security Processor that's integrated in most (all?) Zen CPUs is already an ARM chip, though I guess that they mean actual general purpose CPUs.

AMD has long history of ARM chips already, some examples:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7724/it-begins-amd-announces-...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7990/amd-announces-k12-core-c...

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

#49

Post by bhouston »

eslaught wrote: post #33
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.

Let's not exaggerate here. I've got the M2 Pro Mac Mini, and it is nearly silent, but depending on your workload you still generate nontrivial heat and the fans do need to run to keep it cool. Maybe I notice more because I build a lot of software, but this is not some magic bullet that avoids the need for traditional heat management.

The fan never spins up for me (does the MacMini have a fan?), but then again I just do web development all day. I have my super powered machine (and hot and noisy) in the back room (Ryzen 5950X + NVIDIA RTX) that I remote into if I need to do a render.

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

#50

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

Prior to switching to Apple Silicon, Apple prepared the path with their effort to push for universal binaries by default

Software made yesterday were already prepared to run on their new silicon

Rosetta was only a transition helper, not meant to be a permanent solution

Microsoft didn't do any of that, and still doesn't, their leadership is clueless and dangerous

If Microsoft doesn't put in the effort, it'll never work

Let's hope there's no secret agreement to exclude Linux (?AMD AI?)

I wish Valve would encourage developpers to submit ARM binaries to prepare for the future...

Why only Apple is able to pull it off? Why this lack of care from everybody else?

Meanwhile.. https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-to-launch-for-pc-win...

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