SoftBank to sell Arm Holdings to Nvidia; Update: It was just officially announced!

[Kisai]

18 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Pretty sure Apple wasn’t stupid enough to pour billions into their ARM compatible designs without some sort of perpetual licensing agreement already in place, especially with Macs moving to said CPUs. I’ve been wrong before though.

 

It's almost a certainty due to Apple's founding interest in ARM that they have some kind of perpetual licence to all ARM CPU IP. If they didn't, they would have bought ARM first. A lot of the tech that Apple buys, ends up in the iPhone, but not really anywhere else. (The tech that runs the Xbox 360 Kinect was bought by Apple quite a while back, and the only thing using it is the iPhone cameras for ARKit. This is one piece of tech that Microsoft fumbled in an incredibly incompetent way, and Apple managed to make standard in their iphone's without increasing the price.) 

 

All I'm saying is that I think Apple was probably approached first because Softbank saw it as the biggest piggy bank. nVidia buying it is probably a better option, in so far that at least it's a chip company that probably has designs on the tech. However it's almost certainly going to run into some regulatory hurdles. Probably some prohibition on tearing up existing contracts between ARM and existing licences, or a requiring nVidia to licence CUDA to it's competitors so that it can't have a monopoly on GPU compute.

[Vishera]

7 hours ago, porina said:

Could they have a go at the smartphone SOC market? I'd love a gaming focused chip, big on GPU. Would be great in a gaming tablet which is an area I think is overlooked.

Already exists,the Nintendo switch is using an Nvidia SOC with a Maxwell GPU in it:

Tegra X1 Architecture

 

Model number	Process	CPU			GPU					Memory				Adoption
		Processor	Cores	Frequency	Micro- architecture	Core configuration1	Frequency	GFLOPS (FP32)	GFLOPS (FP16)	Type	Amount	Bus width	Band- width	Availability
T210	TSMC 20nm	Cortex-A57 + Cortex-A53[104]:753	A57: 4 A53: 4[104]	A57: 1.9 GHz A53: 1.3 GHz	GM20B (Maxwell)[104]:14	256:[104]16:16	1000 MHz	512	1024	LPDDR3/LPDDR4	8 GB[104]	64 bit[104]	25.6 GB/s	Q2 2015
T214	TSMC 16nm						1267 MHz[105]	649	1298	LPDDR4/LPDDR4X				Q2 2019
TM660M	?	Cortex-A57	4	1.428 GHz	GM20B (Maxwell)	128:16:16	921 MHz	236	472	LPDDR3?/LPDDR4:773	4 GB (8?)	64 bit		March 2019

Devices[edit]

Model	Devices
T210	Nvidia Shield Android TV (2015 & 2017), Nvidia Jetson TX1 development board,[106] Nvidia Drive CX & PX, Google Pixel C, Nintendo Switch (2017)[107][16]
T214	Nvidia Shield Android TV (2019), Nintendo Switch (2019 model, HAC-001(-01)), Nintendo Switch Lite
TM660M	Jetson Nano

[Kroon]

23 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Apple is a co founder of Arm Holdings, the company set up in the 90s however Apple played no role in the creation of ARM as an architecture.

The current company, the one SoftBanke are selling was co funded by Apple.  Previous iterations of ARM was not in question here.

[porina]

17 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Already exists,the Nintendo switch is using an Nvidia SOC with a Maxwell GPU in it:

Tegra X1 Architecture

I was looking forward to a future refreshed chip. Things have moved on since that was released.

[Vishera]

31 minutes ago, porina said:

I was looking forward to a future refreshed chip. Things have moved on since that was released.

For now the newer Tegra SOCs are primarily manufacturered for the Car and Robotics industries.

The newest version has a Volta GPU,

And there is a new Ampere version expected to be released soon.

 

Nvidia also sells them in cards like graphics cards for their developer kits:

Maxwell version (109,00 €)

Volta version (399 USD)

 

Yep,for some reason the prices appear to me in different currencies on the same page when i try to buy from Nvidia.

[porina]

29 minutes ago, Vishera said:

For now the newer Tegra SOCs are primarily manufacturered for the Car and Robotics industries.

The newest version has a Volta GPU,

And there is a new Ampere version expected to be released soon.

I forgot those existed, most likely as they were likely marketed at AI uses, not so much gaming. Still, we can only wait and see what the future brings. I really don't want to get another iPad when my current one has reached the end of its usefulness.

[Results45]

21 hours ago, Vishera said:

For now the newer Tegra SOCs are primarily manufacturered for the Car and Robotics industries.

The newest version has a Volta GPU,

And there is a new Ampere version expected to be released soon.

 

Nvidia also sells them in cards like graphics cards for their developer kits:

Maxwell version (109,00 €)

Volta version (399 USD)

 

Yep,for some reason the prices appear to me in different currencies on the same page when i try to buy from Nvidia.

 

Yeah if future ARM-based SoCs/APUs in Nintendo and potentially other consoles isn't something like this on steroids, I don't know what is:

 

http://info.nvidia.com/rs/156-OFN-742/images/Jetson_AGX_Xavier_New_Era_Autonomous_Machines.pdf

 

Tensor/Machine-Learning/AI Performance & Accompanying Accelerators:

Spoiler

.

.

 

It's pretty easy to imagine Nvidia replacing the "Vision Accelerator", "Deep Learning Accelerator", and some of the I/O area on-die with RT Cores or better yet ~ integrating a new class of cores that can process both Tensor and RT workloads.

 

Further, comparing the Tegra X2 and AGX Xavier to the PS4 Slim paints a plausible picture where Nintendo's next generation console 1-2 years from now (given they stick with Nvidia and Nvidia releases an Ampere-based gaming grade APU) will have just over a 1-1.5 teraflops of raw CUDA compute with additional performance boost through DLSS 3.0/4.0 and ray-tracing on par with the RTX 2080.

[Vishera]

2 minutes ago, Results45 said:

given they stick with Nvidia and Nvidia releases an Ampere-based gaming grade APU

They already announced an Ampere based SOC,should be released soon.

5 minutes ago, Results45 said:

Yeah if future ARM-based SoCs/APUs in Nintendo and potentially other consoles isn't something like this on steroids, I don't know what is:

~snip~

The AGX has the same SOC as the Jetson Xavier NX,

And next gen consoles will be more powerful than those SOCs.

[Zodiark1593]

7 hours ago, Results45 said:

 

Yeah if future ARM-based SoCs/APUs in Nintendo and potentially other consoles isn't something like this on steroids, I don't know what is:

 

http://info.nvidia.com/rs/156-OFN-742/images/Jetson_AGX_Xavier_New_Era_Autonomous_Machines.pdf

 

Tensor/Machine-Learning/AI Performance & Accompanying Accelerators:

  Reveal hidden contents

.

.

 

It's pretty easy to imagine Nvidia replacing the "Vision Accelerator", "Deep Learning Accelerator", and some of the I/O area on-die with RT Cores or better yet ~ integrating a new class of cores that can process both Tensor and RT workloads.

 

Further, comparing the Tegra X2 and AGX Xavier to the PS4 Slim paints a plausible picture where Nintendo's next generation console 1-2 years from now (given they stick with Nvidia and Nvidia releases an Ampere-based gaming grade APU) will have just over a 1-1.5 teraflops of raw CUDA compute with additional performance boost through DLSS 3.0/4.0 with ray-tracing on par with the RTX 2080.

I think it would be quite amusing if Nintendo did a sudden reversal and launched a console that smacks around the PS5/whatever Microsoft calls their Xbox. 

[Results45]

History in the making: Si-Five slaps it back.

 

Quote

the new RISC-V architecture is designed to enable different classes of performance, efficiency and features through a boon of highly-configurable parameters.

 

When it comes to supercomputers, the updated RISC-V instruction set allows for a combination of scalable vector processing with Linux-capable superscalar multi-core processor designs.

 

The new processor cores also include a complete implementation of the latest RISC-V Vector (RVV) extension that enables a unified processing and development environment for scalar and high-performance vector processing applications.

 

SiFive is planning to demonstrate its first PC-oriented SoC called Freedom U740 at the Linley Conference. This new SoC comes complete with an expanded development environment that allows for the creation of RISC-V applications from bare-metal to Linux-based systems, including porting all existing server-grade applications. PCs with various form-factors can benefit from the heterogeneous mix+match core complex features of the new FU740 SoC.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/SiFive-announces-new-RISC-V-processor-architecture-plus-its-first-ever-desktop-PC-processor-in-response-to-Nvidia-s-plans-to-dominate-the-server-market.494053.0.html