Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Nvidia is such a natural partner for Microsoft when it comes to ARM chips, I’m surprised it’s taking them this long to jump back into the ring after the failed Surface RT. AMD making ARM chips is fascinating and surprising, though, but I guess they don’t feel they can compete on performance-per-watt with x86.
AMD has been making ARM cpus since 2014
Technically they have been making ARM chips for a long while.
nvidia has long developed the “Tegra” SoCs, that power not only their own tablets and media streaming devices, but the famous Nintendo “Switch” console, and also extended versions for machine learning and AI:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-xavier-series/
I even have built a mini “cluster” of these at home (back then when they were much more affordable).
(As far as I know, their GPUs also have ARM cores for firmware, and that is how they “open sourced” the drivers, but need to look that up).
AMD? Long time licensee. And they also have an ARM core inside their x86 CPUs for security:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor
This could be the next logical steps of introducing general purpose CPUs.
sukru,
I heard that they were developing GPUs with RISC-V cores. Is that what you were thinking about maybe? Apparently it’s unlocked in data center/workstation class cards. I believe that nvidia’s main interest in selecting RISC-V cores was being able to sell them royalty free while also taking advantage of existing RISC-V toolchains that they wouldn’t have to build out and support by themselves.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-RISC-V-Next-Gen-Falcon
https://www.techpowerup.com/291088/nvidia-unlocks-gpu-system-processor-gsp-for-improved-system-performance
I do see news about nvidia investing in ARM, but as a separate CPU technology. I found this, where nvidia are getting their RTX GPUs working on ARM hosts, but that’s the extent of what I was able to find in terms of GPU+ARM architecture.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/07/19/geforce-rtx-arm-gdc/
I didn’t really remember the bit about the AMD PSP being an ARM core.
It’s a shame both intel IME and AMD PSP are running proprietary software on our CPUs that we cannot even audit as both have faced some serious vulnerabilities.
Alfman,
You might be right about the RISC-V in nvidia, I thought it was ARM, but was not too sure about it. (Has been a while since that news cycle). Thanks,.
Nevertheless, they have been in the consumer ARM business for more than 10(?) years now. (And, again I already have several such devices at home). Moving this to Windows ARM should be not too difficult for them.
AMD case would be interesting. I don’t think they ever had consumer ARM chips (not sure), at least not with a good GPU (which nvidia has). But they have been licensing their own Radeon designs to other ARM manufacturers, so that too has some precedent.
(Can’t have a desktop chip without proper GPU these days).
AMD also made the ARM version of their opteron
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/hierofalcon-product-brief.pdf
I have not seem that.
Can’t wait for those to drop to surplus stores 3-5 years from now 🙂
(checking Internet)
Ah… that was an old product that unfortunately failed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/rcrfnm/what_happened_to_the_opteron_a1100_series/
Thanks for posting those, I had been waiting for its release for a while before I forgot to check back. Ah well.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
No problem.
I too have been waiting for ARM servers to be available on surplus channels. But there are only ones with very old and slow hardware: https://www.ebay.com/itm/126103181742
Which are even less useful than older Xeon E3’s, and definitely cannot match up to modern desktop ARM machines.
(Though I currently have a Mac for my “ARM developer workstation” needs, still more is desired).
I expected more from AMD, considering they have an x86 license, such as an ARM core that can hardware-accelerate x86 emulation.