Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang disclosed on the firm’s earnings call tonight that the company still has large plans to establish a broad portfolio of Arm-based CPUs for a wide range of applications ranging from the data centre to robotics, despite having to abandon its plans to buy Arm.
The Grace CPU will be delivered in the first half of 2023, according to Nvidia, but it will only be the beginning of the company’s long CPU journey. According to Huang, the company has a 20-year licence for Arm’s design and will use it to produce CPUs for a wide range of applications, from tiny SoCs for robotics to high-end processors for supercomputers.
“We are on track to launch our Arm-based Grace CPU targeting giant AI and HPC workloads in the first half of next year,” said Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, at the company’s earnings call with financial analysts and investors. “Our 20-year architectural license for Arm’s IP allows us the full breadth and flexibility of options across technologies and markets.”
Raptor Lake processors will include a next-generation Raptor Cove core arrangement with up to 24 cores and 32 threads. The highest SKU for the 13th generation Intel CPUs will have 8 Raptor Cove and 16 Gracemont Enhanced cores, accessing a total of 32 threads. The new Intel family will have a total of 54 MB of Smart Cache, with 36 MB of L3 cache for all bodies and 18 MB of L2 cache for the premium Raptor Core chipset.
“You are going to see a lot of exciting CPUs coming from us, and Grace is just the first example. You’re going to see a whole bunch of them beyond that,” said Huang. “We love to see the expansion of CPU footprints, and we are just thrilled that Arm is now growing into robotics, autonomous vehicles, cloud computing, supercomputing. We intend to bring the full spectrum of Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform to Nvidia Arm CPUs.”
Nvidia’s multi-year Arm architecture licencing allows it to create highly customised Arm-based cores for a wide range of applications, similar to what Apple does with its A-series SoCs for smartphones and tablets and M-series processors for Mac desktops. However, while Apple does not appear to be interested in a data centre or supercomputer chips (at least, we are unaware of such intentions), Nvidia wants a top-to-bottom Arm chip family with its cores.
Nvidia believes that as more applications adopt artificial intelligence, its CPU initiatives will add value since the business will be able to provide vertically integrated platforms for a variety of new applications, including autonomous applications such as robotics and cars.
“We have multiple Arm projects going in the company from connected form devices to robotics processors, such as the new Orin [SoC] that is going into autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, and so on,” said Huang. “You could expect us to do a lot of CPU development around the Arm architecture. […] One of the things that developed nicely over the last couple of years is the success that Arm has seen in hyper scalers and data centres. It motivated them to accelerate the development of higher-end CPUs.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang disclosed on the firm’s earnings call tonight that the company still has large plans to establish a broad portfolio of Arm-based CPUs for a wide range of applications ranging from the data centre to robotics, despite having to abandon its plans to buy Arm.
“Our strategy is accelerated computing; that is ultimately what we do for a living,” stated the head of Nvidia. “We will deliver on our three-chip strategy across CPUs, GPUs, and DPUs. “Whether x86 or Arm, we will use the best CPU for the job. Together with partners in the computer industry, we will offer the world’s best computing platform to tackle the most impactful challenges of our time.”
The Grace CPU will be delivered in the first half of 2023, according to Nvidia, but it will only be the beginning of the company’s long CPU journey. According to Huang, the company has a 20-year licence for Arm’s design and will use it to produce CPUs for a wide range of applications, from tiny SoCs for robotics to high-end processors for supercomputers.
Nvidia’s earnings for fiscal 2022 reached a new high of $26.914 billion, up 61 per cent from $16.68 billion the previous year. Furthermore, the company’s net income for the year was $9.752 million, with a gross margin of 64.9 per cent. Its sales for the fourth quarter was $7.643 billion, with a net income of slightly more than $3 billion on a gross margin of 65.4 per cent.
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