Nvidia to Integrate ARM Processors in Tesla
Nvidia has confirmed that it will be combining GPGPUs with ARM 64-bit processors in future Tesla products.
In an article posted by InfoWorld, the company's chief technology officer for the Tesla product line, Steve Scott, was quoted saying, "Tegra is going to become GPU computing capable in the not-so-distant future. Sometime this decade we are also going to start bringing integrated CPUs and GPUs together in the Tesla line".
'Sometime this decade' is not exactly clear, but we would take a guess that Nvidia is shooting for a release prior to 2015.
Scott was referring to ARMv8 processors, recently announced as Cortex-A53 and A-57 models and a 2014 released date. However, Nvidia was not mentioned by ARM in a row of current ARMv8 licensees, which include AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics. However, the emerging microserver market is an opportunity for a natural evolution of Nvidia's business. Combining Tesla with ARMv8 cores will allow the company to compete in a segment that will be crowded with industry heavyweights such as Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments - and Intel on the x86 side. Nvidia will also compete with its arch rival AMD in a new market.
The InfoWorld article pointed to Nvidia's Project Denver, which will be based on using the ARMv8 architecture in Nvidia products. According to ARM, the Cortex-A57 processor will be able to provide up to three times the performance of its current flagship, the 32-bit Cortex-A15 design.
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Wolfgang Gruener is an experienced professional in digital strategy and content, specializing in web strategy, content architecture, user experience, and applying AI in content operations within the insurtech industry. His previous roles include Director, Digital Strategy and Content Experience at American Eagle, Managing Editor at TG Daily, and contributing to publications like Tom's Guide and Tom's Hardware.
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dragonsqrrl Maxwell should see the first integration of ARM cores onto the GPU for Nvidia. It's good to see that's still on track. It's also good to see another hint/confirmation that the next Tegra SOC will have some sort of a unified compute capable GPU, finally moving beyond Nvidia's original mobile GPU architecture.Reply -
A Bad Day Well, looks like Nividia has some catchup to do, though I wonder if they would fare better than Intel's history of not-the-greatest GPUs (before the HD4000s).Reply -
Shin-san That's pretty clever. This makes it more like a self-contained unit and let it do better traffic copping on the board instead on the main CPUReply -
bloc97 sonofliberty08i hope to see the day ARM replacing x86 in the very near futureThat would take quite a while... x86-64 is still the most popular platform and I think it will stay this way for a long time.Reply -
A Bad Day sonofliberty08i hope to see the day ARM replacing x86 in the very near futureReply
Standards die hard. There's still a significant amount of software written for x86 compared to ARM, and business software tend to be the vast majority. -
DjEaZy ... AMD and nVidia implementing ARM now... intel is not... hmm.... AMD and nVidia haz GPU tech, intel haz not... where is this going and will the x86 be just relevant for legacy stuff?Reply -
eddieroolz A computer contained within the GPU can give way to a huge card farm that can compute with more efficiency.Reply -
fb39ca4 Tesla is for parallel computing, so will they have hundreds of ARM cores on each chip? That would make the system a lot more flexible. Currently GPUs are good for brute force number crunching, but are slow when it comes to things like if-then statements because a number of cores have to be working on the same instruction at the same time. With ARM cores, you should see much less of a performance hit when branching especially with stuff like branch prediction.Reply