[HN Gopher] Nvidia Grace CPU ___________________________________________________________________ Nvidia Grace CPU Author : intull Score : 316 points Date : 2022-03-22 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nvidia.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nvidia.com) | [deleted] | [deleted] | kcb wrote: | Given how larger non-mobile chips are jumping to the LPDDR | standard what is the point of having a separate DDR standard? Is | there something about LPDDR5 that makes upgradable dimms not | possible? | [deleted] | monocasa wrote: | > Is there something about LPDDR5 that makes upgradable dimms | not possible? | | It's theoretically possible, but there's no standard for it. | wmf wrote: | AFAIK the higher speed of LPDDR is directly because it avoids | signal degradation caused by DIMM connectors. | andrewstuart wrote: | 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? | frozenport wrote: | What? They are sold out, not "can't be purchased". | aftbit wrote: | What's the difference? If they are perpetually sold out, then | they cannot be purchased. | singlow wrote: | There is constant production and deliveries being made, | just no standing inventory. | Gigachad wrote: | 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. | arebop wrote: | Though, there is a shortage of m1 MacBooks. Is it really | because they are low value (margin?) products relative to | iPhone? I'm not sure. | Gigachad wrote: | Not much of a shortage. I just checked and they are all | available for pickup right now at my local small city | store. Compared to other products they are still extremely | available. | arebop wrote: | Interesting, I see nothing available from store.apple.com | until 6 April earliest, and 29 April for m1 max and even | later depending on options. | p1necone wrote: | I was pretty surprised by the low prices of m1 macbooks | when even the lowest end models perform so much better than | the high end of previous models. I'm sure Apple is spending | less money on manufacturing them now that they're not going | through Intel, but I would have expected them to just keep | charging the same and eaten the profit margin themselves. | eftychis wrote: | They are trying to establish the new architecture. Also | you still need to shell out $2-3k to get something decent | and practically start at $1.5k. I wouldn't call that | cheap or even cheaper. What is the past difference you | see? | p1necone wrote: | > still need to shell out $2-3k to get something decent | and practically start at $1.5k | | They're all using the exact same CPU, in fact you can | make the air perform (almost) just as well as the | pro/mini by opening it up and adding a thermal pad: | https://www.cultofmac.com/759693/thermal-mod-m1-macbook- | air/ | rsynnott wrote: | Starting price for the air is $999, which gets you a very | fast computer (albeit one a bit anemic in memory). A | couple of years ago, the starting price for the air was | still $999, but you got a... much less fast computer. | 20220322-beans wrote: | What are people's experience of developing with NVIDIA? I know | what Linus thinks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ | jlokier wrote: | I had a laptop with NVIDIA GPU that crashed Xorg and had to be | rebooted whenever Firefox opened WebGL. Just to complement the | positive sibling comments :-) | nl wrote: | Nvidia's AI APIs are well documented and supported. That's why | everyone uses them. | dekhn wrote: | over the past two decades that I've used nvidia products for | opengl and other related things, my experince has been largely | positive although I find installing both the dev packages and | the runtimes I need to be cumbersome. | pjmlp wrote: | Linus might know his way around UNIX clones and SCM systems, | however he doesn't do graphics. | | NVidia tooling is the best among all GPU vendors. | | CUDA has been polyglot since version 3.0, you get proper IDE | and GPGPU debugging tools, and a plethora of libraries for most | uses cases one could think of using a GPGPU for. | | OpenCL did not fail only because of NVidia not caring, Intel | and AMD have hardly done anything with it that could compete on | the same tooling level. | dsign wrote: | I like CUDA, that stuff works and is rewarding to use. The only | problem is the tons and tons of hoops one must jump to use it | in servers. Because a server with a GPU is so expensive, you | can't just rent one and have it running 24x7 if you don't have | work for it to do, so you need a serverless or auto-scaling | deployment. That increases your development workload. Then | there is the matter of renting a server with GPU; that's still | a bit of a specialty offering. Until the other day, even major | cloud providers (i.e. AWS and Google) offered GPUs only in | certain datacenters. | valine wrote: | Anyone have a sense for how much these will cost? Is this more | akin to the Mac Studio that costs 4k or an A100 gpu that costs | upward of 30k? Looking for an order of magnitude. | IshKebab wrote: | Probably on the order of $100k. | valine wrote: | That would be a real shame. I really want someone to make a | high core count ARM processor in the price range of an AMD | threadripper that can work with Nvidia gpus. | freemint wrote: | Look into Ampere they have 256 core and 160 core dual | socket systems for decent prices | https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere.html . | wmf wrote: | Ampere Altra? | wmf wrote: | Compare a 72C Grace against an 80C Ampere Altra which is priced | at $4K (without RAM). | naikrovek wrote: | This is definitely not a consumer-grade device, like a Mac | Studio. | Hamuko wrote: | Considering that the URL is "/data-center/grace-cpu/", assume | much more than a Mac Studio. | oofbey wrote: | The top-end datacenter GPUs have been slowly creeping up from | $5k a few generations back to about $15k for the A100's now. So | this one will probably continue the trend, probably to $20k or | maybe $30k but probably not beyond that. | rsynnott wrote: | > NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip | | Finally, a computer optimised for COBOL. | ksec wrote: | 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 come with ECC. And they can cross sell those with | Nvidia's ConnectX-7 SmartNICs. | | Hopefully it will be price competitive. | | Edit: Rather than downvoting may be explain why or what you | disagree with ? | messe wrote: | 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. | MBCook wrote: | More cores and more RAM is really kind of it. I guess PCIe | but I'm kind of wondering if they'll do that. | lostlogin wrote: | And more worryingly, will a GPU function in the slots. | | The questions everyone has, Ram and GPU. | belval wrote: | AWS Graviton aren't toys, they work pretty well for a wide | range of workloads | [deleted] | didip wrote: | heh, does Intel have any chance to catch up? They fell so far | behind. | wmf wrote: | There are some hints that they are redesigning some server | processors to double core count but that may not be visible for | 2-3 years. Also keep in mind that Intel has 75% server market | share and is only losing ~5 points per year. | hughrr wrote: | No. Intel worked out it needs to open its production capacity | to other vendors. They will end up another ARM fab with a | legacy x86-64 business strapped on the side. That's probably | not a bad place to be really. I think x86-64 will fizzle out in | about a decade. | qbasic_forever wrote: | I really don't see what they can do. It seems like in the last | year they pivoted hard into "ok we'll build chips in the US | again!", but it's going to be years and years before any of | that pays off or even materializes. The only announcements I've | heard from them are just regular "Here's the CEO of Intel | telling us how he's going to fix Intel" PR blurbs and nothing | else. Best case maybe they just position themselves to be | bought by Nvidia... | bullen wrote: | I think we're all missing the forest because all the cores are in | the way: | | The contention on that memory means that only segregated non- | cooporative as in not "joint parallel on the same memory atomic" | will scale on this hardware better than on a 4-core vanilla Xeon | from 2018 per watt. | | So you might aswell buy 20 Jetson Nanos and connect them over the | network. | | Let that sink in... NOTHING is improving at all... there is ZERO | point to any hardware that CAN be released for eternity at this | point. | | Time to learn JavaSE and roll up those sleves... electricity | prices are never coming down (in real terms) no matter how high | the interest rate. | | As for GPUs, I'm calling it now: nothing will dethrone the 1030 | in Gflops/W in general and below 30W in particular; DDR4 or DDR5, | doesn't matter. | | Memory is the latency bottleneck since DDR3. | | Please respect the comment on downvote principle. Otherwise you | don't really exist; in a quantum physical way anyway. | ribit wrote: | 1030 has been dethroned a while ago. Apple G13 delivers | 260GFLOPS/W in a general-purpose GPU. I mean, their phone has | more GPU FLOPS than a 1030. | [deleted] | simulate-me wrote: | Performance per watt isn't so useful for a GPU. People training | ML algorithms would gladly increase power consumption if they | could train larger models or train models faster. | bullen wrote: | And that's exactly my point: they can't. Power does not solve | contention and latency! It's over, permanently... (or atleast | until some photon/quantum alternative, which honestly we | don't have the energy to imagine, let alone manufacture, | anymore) | cma wrote: | 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. | bullen wrote: | 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? | luxuryballs wrote: | Reading this makes a veteran software developer want to become a | scientific researcher. | bitwize wrote: | IKR? Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these... | nlh wrote: | Slashdot flashbacks from 2001! Well played. Well played. | wmf wrote: | We call it a "SuperPOD" now apparently. | fennecfoxen wrote: | https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-superpod/ | stonogo wrote: | I don't think you'll have to imagine. It says on the box it's | designed for HPC. and every supercomputer in the Top 500 has | been a Beowulf cluster for years now. | melling wrote: | Way too late for me. I think adding machine learning to my | toolbox at least gets me knowledgeable. | | https://www.kaggle.com/ | | When Jensen talks about Transformers, I know what he's talking | about because I follow a lot of talented people. | | https://www.kaggle.com/code/odins0n/jax-flax-tf-data-vision-... | donatj wrote: | Maybe it's just me, but it's just cool to see the CPU market | competitive again for the first time since the late 90s. | sedatk wrote: | You're not alone. | andrewstuart wrote: | I wonder why Intel never had a really good go at GPU's? It | seems strange, given the demand. | _delirium wrote: | Besides integrated GPUs for actual graphics usage that other | comments mentioned, Intel did make some attempts at the GPGPU | market. They had a design for a GPU aimed primarily at GPGPU | workloads, Larrabee, that was never released [1], and adapted | some of the ideas into Xeon Phi, a more CPU-like chip that | was intended to be a competitor to GPUs, which was released | but didn't gain a lot of market share [2]. | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) | | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi | nine_k wrote: | Intel produced good, as in "cheap and always working", | integrated GPUs. For great many tasks, they are adequate. I'm | not a gamer, and if I needed to run some ML stuff, my | laptop's potential discrete GPU won't be much help anyway. | liotier wrote: | Also, Intel has a history of producing or commissioning | open-source drivers for its GPU. I like the peace of mind I | get from knowing I'm not going to have to fight dirty for | the privilege of getting my own GPU to do the work I bought | it to perform. | bduerst wrote: | Intel also announced a new GPU offering, supposed to drop in | 8 days: | | https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and- | tec... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc | tyrfing wrote: | 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 stuff, and it seems like the first major products | from that effort will be coming out this year. That said, | they've obviously had a lot of failures in the acelerator and | graphics area (consider Altera) and Koduri has stated on | Twitter that Gelsinger is the first CEO to actually treat | graphics/HPC as a priority. | marcodiego wrote: | Time to sell intel shares? | bloodyplonker22 wrote: | That time was years and years ago. If you're just thinking | about it now, you're already in a world of pain. | namlem wrote: | Intel stock is up 37% from 5 years ago. Though this past year | they took quite a beating. | aabceh wrote: | This is really not that much considering how much every | stock has gone up the last couple of years. Nvidia and AMD | is up 887% and 737% respectively from 5 years ago. | t0mas88 wrote: | How likely is it that one of AWS / GCP / Azure will deploy these? | Nvidia has some relationships there for the A100 chips. | qbasic_forever wrote: | Amazon has at least two generations of their own homebrew ARM | chip, the Graviton. They offer it for people to rent and use in | AWS, and publicly stated they are rapidly transitioning their | internal services to use it too. In my experience Graviton 2 is | much cheaper than x86 for typical web workloads--I've seen | costs cut by 20-40% with it. | devmunchies wrote: | > their own homebrew ARM chip | | are they going through TSMC like NVIDIA or are they using | Samsung? | lmeyerov wrote: | AWS+Azure (and I believe GCP) installed prev advances, and are | having huge GPU shortages in general... so probably! | | An interesting angle here is these support partitioning even | better than in the A100's. AFAICT, the cloud vendors are not | yet providing partitioned access, so everyone just exhausts | worldwide g4dn capacity for smaller jobs / devs / etc. But | partitioning can solve that... | ksec wrote: | AWS has their own CPU. Microsoft is an investor in Ampere, but | I am not sure if they will make one themselves or simply buy | from Ampere. Google has responded with faster x86 instances, | still no hint of their own ARM CPU. But judging from the past I | dont think they are going to go with Nvidia. | | That is only the CPU though, they might deploy it as Grace + | Hopper config. | ciphol wrote: | With names like that, I assume that was the intention | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | Pretty sure they all will, they all already have the past gens | of these things and it's a simple upgrade. | donkeydoug wrote: | soooo... would something like this be a viable option for a non- | mac desktop similar to the 'mac studio' ? def seems targeted at | the cloud vendors and large labs... but it'd be great to have a | box like that which could run linux. | opencl wrote: | It's viable in the sense that you can just stick a server | motherboard inside of a desktop case. It certainly won't be | cheap though. | | This has been done as a commercial product with the Ampere ARM | server chips. The base model is about $8k. | | https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-desktops.html | wmf wrote: | Nvidia Orin would be a better fit for an ARM desktop/laptop but | Nvidia seemingly isn't interested in that market. | my123 wrote: | It's a server CPU that runs any OS really (Arm SystemReady with | UEFI and ACPI). | | However, the price tag will be too high for a lot of desktop | buyers. | | (There are smaller Tegras around though) | oneplane wrote: | It probably won't run Windows. But other operating systems, | probably yes. Maybe Microsoft comes up with some sort of | Windows Server DC Arm edition in the future so they can join | in as well. | my123 wrote: | Modern Tegras can boot arm64 Windows. But yeah without a | licensable Windows Server arm64 SKU, practical uses are | quite limited. | GIFtheory wrote: | Interesting that this has 7x the cores of a M1 Ultra, but only | 25% more memory bandwidth. Those will be some thirsty cores! | wmf wrote: | The M1 memory bandwidth is mostly for the GPU but Grace does | not include an (on-chip) GPU. | my123 wrote: | https://twitter.com/benbajarin/status/1506296302971334664?s=... | | 396MB of on-chip cache... (198MB per die) | | That's a significant part of it too. | Teknoman117 wrote: | The CPU complex on the M1 series doesn't have anything close to | the full bandwidth to memory that the SoC has (like, half). The | only thing that can drive the full bandwidth is the GPU. | ZetaZero wrote: | M1 Ultra bandwidth is for CPU and GPU (800GB/s). Grace is just | the CPU. Hopper, the GPU, has it's own memory and bandwidth (3 | TB/sec). | oofbey wrote: | NVIDIA continues to vertically integrate their datacenter | offerings. They bought mellanox to get infiniband. They tried to | buy ARM - that didn't work. But they're building & bundling CPUs | anyway. I guess when you're so far ahead on the compute side, | it's all the peripherals that hold you back, so they're putting | together a complete solution. | DeepYogurt wrote: | Nvidia's been making their own CPUs for a long time now. IIRC | the first tegra was used in the Zune HD back in 2009. Hell | they've even tried their hand at their own cpu core designs | too. | | https://www.anandtech.com/show/7621/nvidia-reveals-first-det... | | https://www.anandtech.com/show/7622/nvidia-tegra-k1/2 | my123 wrote: | Tegra X2 and Xavier are still sold today and contain NVIDIA- | designed CPU cores. The team behind those is building new | designs too, I wonder when they're going to announce | something. | azzentys wrote: | Orin | my123 wrote: | Orin uses the Cortex-A78AE core for the CPU complex | instead of NVIDIA-designed cores. | azzentys wrote: | Ah, you meant like that. I assumed if they're bringing a | new module architecture. | 015a wrote: | Maybe even more importantly: Tegra powers the Nintendo | Switch. | TazeTSchnitzel wrote: | Note the CPU cores in that design aren't designed by | NVidia. | ggreg84 wrote: | Which is (EDIT: NOT) the most widely sold console ever. | fazzyfoo wrote: | Not by a long shot. | | PS2 and DS outsell by about 50 million units. | nickelcitymario wrote: | "PS2? That can't possibly be right..." | | https://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/ | | Holay molay. | overtonwhy wrote: | It was the most affordable DVD player. I think Sony owned | patents on some DVD player tech? Same with PS4/5 and Blu | Ray if I'm remembering correctly | 015a wrote: | This was also kind of the case with the PS3. Its sales | weren't fantastic at release, partially because of its... | $600 (?) price tag. But even at that price, at its | release, it was one of the cheapest ways to get a Blu-ray | player, and many people bought it for that. | BolexNOLA wrote: | If memory serves, there was less than 1 game per PS3 sold | at launch. | genewitch wrote: | Not just a Blu-ray player, but one that is guaranteed to | be able to play practically all blu-ray discs as long as | Blu ray discs are made or the console hardware fails. | | Sony pushed updates to the firmware. Most commodity Blu | ray players don't have an (easy) way to update. | ggreg84 wrote: | Indeed, wow. | shawnthye wrote: | cjensen wrote: | "Grace?" | | After 13 microarchitectures given the last names of historical | figures, it's really weird to use someone's first name. | Interesting that Anandtech and Wikipedia are both calling it | Hopper. What on Earth are the marketing bros thinking? | fay59 wrote: | They also made the "Hopper" architecture to complement it. | thereddaikon wrote: | The GPU is Hopper, which is in line with their naming scheme up | till now. The CPU is call Grace. Clearly they are planning to | continue the tradition of naming their architectures after | famous scientists and the CPUs will take on the first name | while the GPU will continue to use last. | | So expect a future Einstein GPU to come with a matching Albert | CPU. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-22 23:00 UTC)