Nvidia Corp. is stepping up its artificial-intelligence competition with Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. by introducing a new central processing unit to crunch reams of data, with technology based on its acquisition target Arm Holdings PLC.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Monday introduced the new technology, dubbed Grace, in the keynote address of Nvidia’s annual GTC developers conference. Nvidia’s new bundle for servers includes a freshly designed CPU, a type of data-center technology dominated by Intel and AMD that Nvidia has long considered manufacturing before taking the plunge.
“Nvidia is now a three-chip company,” Huang said in a news release, referencing the company’s core graphics-processing units, or GPUs, and data-processing units, or DPUs. In his keynote address, Huang called the Grace CPU “a new kind of computer,” “the basic building block of the modern data center,” and “the final piece of the puzzle.”
According to NVIDIA, a Grace-powered system is ten times faster at training a natural language processing (NLP) model with one trillion parameters compared to its x86 DGXTM machines. Similar to Apple, NVIDIA may be hitting the limits of current x86 hardware at this point, so the only choice is to take things into its own hands.
Nvidia’s CPU will use Arm technology, which has not found wide acceptance in the data-center market. Nvidia has agreed to acquire Arm at a $40 billion valuation, but will make the Grace’s CPU using a license from the chip-architecture company while waiting for approvals for the deal that could stretch in 2022, if they arrive at all.
“Fundamentally, there’s no reason that Arm cannot be as competitive on the higher end as X86s with Intel and AMD and Power is at IBM,” Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research, told MarketWatch.
“Arm’s already on this path and this is an indication that Nvidia supports that and wants to push it forward even faster.”
