
Nvidia’s Integration Dreams - kaboro
https://stratechery.com/2020/nvidias-integration-dreams/
======
DCKing
Huang's first reason why they would take up ARM is really, really interesting
(and serves as a big counterpoint for my pessimistic take on the announcement
yesterday).

> Number one is this: as you know, we would love to take Nvidia’s IP through
> ARM’s network. Unless we were one company, I think the ability for us to do
> that and to do that with all of our might, is very challenging. I don’t take
> other people’s products through my channel! I don’t expose my ecosystem to
> to other company’s products. The ecosystem is hard-earned — it took 30 years
> for Arm to get here — and so we have an opportunity to offer that whole
> network, that vast ecosystem of partners and customers Nvidia’s IP. You can
> do some simple math and the economics there should be very exciting.

If Nvidia _truely_ sees ARM as an opportunity kill off Mali and expand
Geforce's install base, they might create an incentive for themselves to keep
the ARM ecosystem alive. Note this is a pretty credible take I think -
Samsung's next Exynos processor will have Radeon graphics and Nvidia can
quickly nip that stuff in the bud by this (assuming Geforce is better and
cheaper). If this plays out this way would simply be great for the ARM
ecosystem. _If_ Nvidia can sell Geforce like ARM sells Mali and leave the ARM
ecosystem truly intact, I don't think many will lament the demise of Mali
(although I expect some counterviews for this on HN :) ).

Having Geforce be a commanding presence in the ARM ecosystem might be a big
problem for the future diversity of GPU vendors though, but that's something
I'm interested in seeing play out at least. I do hope AMD can take the battle
to Nvidia on ARM too, and that Qualcomm and PowerVR find ways to stay
relevant.

~~~
rektide
> If Nvidia truely sees ARM as an opportunity kill off Mali and expand
> Geforce's install base,

Perfect replacement, from one unsupported hard to use non-open-source Linux-
drivered gpu to another hard to use non open source Linux drivered gpu.

> I do hope AMD can take the battle to Nvidia on ARM too, and that Qualcomm
> and PowerVR find ways to stay relevant.

Qualcomm's Adreno amusingly enough came from AMD, as Imageon, in 2009. I
definitely hope AMD can get back in the mobile game though. Good luck to
powervr & anyone else too. You are probably up for some hard competition
soon!!

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageon)

~~~
YetAnotherNick
> non-open-source Linux-drivered gpu

I have seen this concern countless times, but not why that matters to them. I
can understand it matters from Linus' perspective as kernel maintainer, but
from users perspective I can't really get the issue. Anyways, not all code
that runs on your system is open source. Why not demand your bootloader
manufacturer for open source with the same intensity. If say NVIDIA wants the
driver to contain malicious backdoor, open source is not going to stop them.

~~~
smichel17
> from users perspective I can't really get the issue ... If say NVIDIA wants
> the driver to contain malicious backdoor, open source is not going to stop
> them.

No, but if such a backdoor were discovered, it _would_ be possible to do
something about it. The quote from the article in top comment here says it
well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23944954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23944954)

> Anyways, not all code that runs on your system is open source.

Not yet, but it is my goal. If/when that's achieved, I'd also like to run it
exclusively on free/libre/open (FLO) hardware.

> Why not demand your bootloader manufacturer for open source with the same
> intensity.

My bootloader plays a much smaller role in my computing endeavors than my gpu.
And less importantly, as a practical matter, there's many more major
motherboard vendors, and few FLO alternatives; whereas both nvidia
alternatives (amd, integrated intel) _do_ have FLO drivers.

------
varbhat
I think that if Nvidia open sourced it's Graphic Drivers , 80℅ of backslash
against Nvidia would disappear suddenly.

I think that Backslash against Nvidia is due to it's somewhat hostile nature
towards OpenSource (to be accurate, they didn't open source Nvidia's Graphic
Drivers).

But, Nvidia's drivers work well(Nvidia's Linux drivers are somewhat on parity
with Windows ones) . I heard that until AMD open sourced their drivers, lot of
them were preaching that Nvidia is only way to Play high end games on
Linux(also CUDA).

Personally, I prefer AMD GPU. I find their drivers to work great with Linux.

~~~
Macha
Yes, nvidia (the proprietary GPU driver) was way better than fglrx (the
proprietary amd driver) and even nouveau (the open source reverse engineered
driver for Nvidia) worked better than radeon for me in those days. It was
intel for smooth sailing or nvidia for acceptable performance.

I think their unpopularity these days come from three factors:

1\. For the gamer crowd, RTX 2000 was a price hike and even the higher end
cards were not that impressive for performance. It looks like they were
resting on their lead against AMD.

2\. People love to root for the underdog and AMD was behind for the longest
time.

3\. For the developer crowd, the closed source Nvidia drivers were not great
for Linux compatibility, and the Mac crowd couldn't care because they couldn't
have Nvidia after their fight with Apple.

I think for a sample of the general public who have opinions on Nvidia, it's
1,2 and 3 in that order while for HN users, it's 3, 2 and 1 in that order.

~~~
formerly_proven
> 2\. People love to root for the underdog and AMD was behind for the longest
> time.

AMD has had pretty much always a solid mid-tier offering in the last five
years, but people would still rather buy an nVidia card (like, say, a 1050)
instead of the better AMD (at the price point) because of the "1080 Ti" halo
effect.

nVidias software stack is pretty bad. Sure, the driver core works pretty well.
The nVidia control panel looks like it was last updated in 2004, _which is
actually true_ (go find some screenshots of it from 15 years ago running on
XP, it looks the same). Now, that doesn't mean it has to be bad (don't fix
what isn't broken), but the NCP is actually clunky to use. Not to imply AMD's
variant is necessarily better, but at least they're working on it.

The nVidia "value-adds" like shadow play and so on are all extremely buggy.
And while their core driver may be good, you still get somewhat frequent
driver resets and hangs with certain interactive GPU compute applications.

~~~
gruez
>AMD has had pretty much always a solid mid-tier offering in the last five
years, but people would still rather buy an nVidia card (like, say, a 1050)
instead of the better AMD (at the price point) because of the "1080 Ti" halo
effect.

Do people actually think this way? "I'll buy the nvidia 2060 super rather than
the amd 5700 xt (for the same price, and benchmarks higher), because nvidia
has the 2080 ti"

~~~
Miraste
The people who look at benchmarks aren't the ones deciding that way. It's more
like "I heard Nvidia makes the fastest GPUs, I'll buy the Nvidia one I can
afford."

------
cinntaile
"I don’t know if it will work; data centers are about the density of
processing power, which is related to but still different than performance-
per-watt, ARM’s traditional advantage relative to Intel, and there are a huge
amount of 3rd-parties involved in such a transition." But isn't performance-
per-watt starting to become more important than the density of processing
power which is limited by your power consumption?

They have been buying some other data center/HPC companies as well this year
like Mellanox and Cumulus, to me it almost seems like they want to own the
entire data center stack and eventually provide a similar offering as AWS,
Azure and Google Cloud.

~~~
MikeCapone
They'd rather sell the picks & shovels to AWS, Azure and GCP.

~~~
Macha
Isn't this more selling the ore to the pick and shovel makers? The hapless
gold miners in this case being all the Uber for street sweeper startups

~~~
nitrogen
Totally OT I know, but _Uber for street sweeper_ \-- I want this. Give me an
app to request a quick cleanup and maybe try to get my neighbors to chip in.
Or to report roadway debris to the city. Or for driveway snow removal during
the winter.

~~~
cinntaile
Your city might have an app for reporting issues to the city.
[https://www.sandiego.gov/get-it-done](https://www.sandiego.gov/get-it-done)
has it for example.

------
discodave
The comments about edge, and combining Nvidia / graphics tech with Arm makes a
lot of sense to me. I suspect that's where most of the value of this merger
will come from. When it comes to Arm in the datacenter, my question is: How do
they actually plan to extract money from ARM displacing x86?

AWS has been deploying at least one ARM chip (Annapurna/Nitro) on _every
single_ EC2 server for 5+ years. Surely they would have made sure their
license ensures future rights to keep using ARM at a reasonable price. Their
Graviton instances are effectively just one more ARM chip, so an Intel
instance has 2 Arm chips (1 for EBS, 1 for networking) while a Graviton/Arm
instance has 3 (EBS, networking, CPU).

Unless the Arm license reads something like "If you make a really big multi-
core chip we get to charge you more"... how does the x86 -> Arm transition
actually move the needle for Arm Holdings / Nvidia?

~~~
freeone3000
Arm licensing of their processor includes a royalty. More processor sales make
more money for Arm.

~~~
discodave
This estimate has 6 billion Arm chips shipped in Q4 2019:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131983/arm-based-
chip-u...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131983/arm-based-chip-unit-
shipments-as-reported-by-licensees-worldwide)

The hyperscale/cloud datacenter market is single-digit millions of CPUs
shipped per year. So if the whole cloud went to Arm tomorrow it would be less
than 1% of total Arm chip shipments.

My point is that unless there's a way to extract higher $ per chip in the
datacenter then actually it doesn't make a difference for Arm.

Edit: By datacenter market I'm really referring to AWS/GCP/Azure... the rest
of the market ain't going en-masse to Arm anytime soon.

~~~
btian
What makes you think ARM charges the same for a Neoverse N1 CPU as a Cortex M0
CPU?

That wouldn't make business sense.

~~~
discodave
I don't know what's in those licenses. Feel free to enlighten me :)

But it also wouldn't make business sense for Amazon to hang their hat on ARM
without assurances or contractual guarantees that they can keep selling ARM
chips for a reasonable price into the future. Where I define "reasonable" as
Arm taking a much, much smaller cut of the final price than what Intel can do.

------
klelatti
On the Arm in the datacenter point, Nvidia doesn't actually have to cut off IP
from competitors to achieve dominance, just the ability to do so is enough.
Would anyone continue to fund Ampere (the company not the graphics
architecture) if they know that they are dependent on one of their biggest
competitors for IP?

I'm prepared to make a prediction: In 5 years Nvidia will be the only
significant Arm supplier in the datacenter and all the other entrants will
have given up - and that this explains why Intel's stock has risen over the
last couple of days.

~~~
wmf
I agree with this except to point out that Nuvia and Marvell are not dependent
on Arm.

------
qlk1123
Back in May 2017, a talk in RISC-V con ([https://riscv.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI...](https://riscv.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf) ) was given. Here
are the conclusions of the talk:

\- NVIDIA will use RISC-V processors in many of its products

\- We are contributing because RISC-V and our interests align

\- Contribute to the areas that you feel passionate about!

Since then, I didn't observe much NVIDIA activities in RISC-V software
community. But some NVIDIA people do participate Virtual Memory Task Group.

Apparently, the stance have changed.

------
Mupuff
I wonder how the world would've looked like if companies with valuation
greater than 100 billion (adjusted to inflation) just wouldn't be allowed to
purchase and\or merge with other companies.

------
wffurr
Hard to wrap my mind around what a "data center software platform" means in
practice. Isn't that covered by things like AWS and Azure?

~~~
ramses0
Own NVidia GPU's. Own ARM chips. Connect ARM chips to NVidia GPU's in big
racks of racks connected to power.

ARM is effectively embarrassingly parallel, low-power compute, and GPU's are
parallel high-power compute.

If NVidia got into datacenter design (with ARM+GPU), dropped K8S+S3+Postgres
onto it, charged $1999.95/mo for access, what could they deliver to customers?

What would a vertically integrated datacenter look like where you are the
designer + manufacturer for everything from the concrete up?

~~~
paulmd
> What would a vertically integrated datacenter look like where you are the
> designer + manufacturer for everything from the concrete up?

A lot like AWS, Oracle Cloud, and soon to be Google Cloud and Azure?

people are losing their shit but this isn't even that novel lol, quite a few
other players already own their full stack.

~~~
pathseeker
None of those companies make their CPUs or GPUs.

~~~
Keyframe
AWS Graviton, although an arm.. Google TPU and affinity for experiments like
with POWER.. microsoft hiring people with custom cpu/soc experience (and they
have experience with sq1/snapdragon)

------
thewindowmovie3
This sounds like a blessing in disguise for Intel. Nvdia trying to compete in
the server space effectively means that most of the other companies designing
Arm servers will go out of business. Since Nvdia will not be interested in any
of the other market Arm is in, it will be neglected.

------
ThinkBeat
Old cynic:

This all sounds like buzzword bingo and vaporware. It is one possible future.
It also highly depends on the definition of "our time" \--

We are joining arms with Arm to create the leading computing company for the
age of AI.

AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. Learning from data, AI
supercomputers can write software no human can.

Amazingly, AI software can perceive its environment, infer the best plan, and
act intelligently.

This new form of software will expand computing to every corner of the globe

------
nerpderp82
NVidia will make CUDA cores available across the whole ARM ecosystem, from
Cortex-M? on up.

NVidia will integrate Arm cores into their GPUs where the GPU itself will
start to become server hosted on a PCIe bus, potentially with its own
Infiniband connection.

------
sameersegal
“Owning it all ... from cloud to edge” is an exciting ambition not only for
Nvidia but also as a developer and a consumer. It’s going to be hard to pull
it off, of course, but it’s worth a shot.

EDIT - explaining the benefits for developers, and therefore consumers.

A "cloud to edge" stack from hardware to the application layer could create
new application patterns that can tremendously accelerate autonomous driving,
everyday robots, gaming. It could democratize this for small (maybe indie)
developer teams. Wouldn't this have a great impact on consumers?

~~~
throwaway2048
The idea of a company "owning it all" does not sound like something that I am
going to benefit from as a consumer long term.

~~~
paulmd
AMD and Intel also already "own it all" in this sense. NVIDIA is merely a
third competitor in this space, with a much more undesirable CPU IP.

You should welcome a third competitor to the duopoly that has strangled CPU
development. We surely could have made much more progress if x86 was not
limited to only two (really three) competitors, you can already see how much
change that AMD getting back in the game has made.

And I'm not sure Huang is going to burn it all down anyway. That seems like it
would be a shortsighted move that would negatively affect the long-term value
of ARM.

But I mean - I don't think anyone can deny that Huang would do great things
with ARM. Terrible, perhaps, but also great.

(and it says a lot that a lot of people are probably nodding along with a
comparison of one of the greatest tech CEOs of all time to literal Voldemort,
the public opinions on NVIDIA and Huang are just ridiculously hyperbolic)

~~~
tarlinian
AMD and Intel don't actually own it all, certainly not from a software
perspective. That's the difference here. The upshot of this article is that
Nvidia basically wants to "CUDAify" the entire datacenter software stack.
Intel and AMD absolutely do not have that kind of lock-in. You don't need to
use their proprietary language to write programs that run on their systems.

~~~
klelatti
This is such an important point.

Plus CUDA shows what can happen even when alternatives are available (OpenCL
for example) you just have to use the hardware / software integration to be
sufficiently ahead and establish a virtuous circle.

------
newsclues
Will they buy micron or another major memory company?

------
Ericson2314
I hope this fails miserably.

NVidia doubly fucks over desktop Linux with it's proprietary drivers and CUDA
beating Khronos Group stuff, and I don't want their abilities to grow.

~~~
Ericson2314
The post author is very bullish on commoditization and modularization winning
in the end, and points out this would damper or sink NVidia's plans, and I
very much hope he is right.

------
pixelpoet
> The most advanced versions of Nvidia’s just-announced GeForce RTX 30 Series,
> for example, has an incredible 10,496 cores.

I'm _so_ tired of Nvidia getting away with this blatant falsehood.

They weren't even actual-cores when Nvidia started counting SIMT lanes as
"cores" (how many hands do you have, 2 or 10? And somebody who writes twice as
fast as you must obviously have 20 hands, yes?), and now that the cores can,
under some conditions, do dual-issue, they are counting each one double.

What's next, calling each bit in a SIMT lane a "core"?

~~~
jrockway
As a GPU buyer, I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all. They list all
their specs as like "X ray tracing cores, Y tensor cores, Z CUDA cores" and I
have no idea how that translates to real-world performance. Which of those
does my game use? Which of those does Blender use when raytracing? (Those are
the two applications that I use a GPU for, so the ones I personally care
about.) And the cores are listed as separate things, but I have the feeling
they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then there aren't Z unused
CUDA cores sitting around, right?

I think it all ends up being useless at best and completely misleading at
worse. The reality is that I don't even know if I want to buy their product or
not. I guess that's what reviews are for? But why do reviewers have to do the
job of Nvidia's marketing department? Seems strange to me.

~~~
dahart
> But why do reviewers have to do the job of Nvidia's marketing department?

Are you suggesting you would rather read reviews of Nvidia products that are
written by Nvidia, and you would trust them more than 3rd party reviews?

> I don't understand Nvidia's marketing at all.

Do read @TomVDBs comments; this isn't Nvidia, this is the industry-wide
marketing terminology.

Cores are important to developers, so what you're talking about is that some
of the marketing is (unsurprisingly) not targeted for you. If you care most
about Blender and games, you should definitely seek out the benchmarks for
Blender and the games you play. Even if you understood exactly what cores are,
that wouldn't change anything here, you would still want to focus on the apps
you use and not on the specs, right?

> I have the feeling they're not; if you're using all Y tensor cores, then
> there aren't Z unused CUDA cores sitting around, right?

FWIW, that's a complicated question. There's more going on than just whether
these cores are separate things. The short answer is that they are, but there
are multiple subsystems that both types of cores have to share, memory being
one of the more critical examples. The better answer here is to compare the
perf of the applications you care about, using Nvidia cards to using AMD
cards, picking the same price point for each. That's how to decide which to
buy, not worrying about the internal engineering.

~~~
jrockway
I wouldn't trust them more, but it would be a good rule of thumb for whether
or not I need to be awake during this product cycle. For example, if they're
like "3% more performance on the 3090 vs. the RTX Titan" then I can just
ignore it and not even bother reading the reviews. Instead, they're just like
"well it has GDDR6X THE X IS FOR XTREME" which is totally meaningless.

~~~
dahart
> Instead, they're just like "well it has GDDR6X THE X IS FOR XTREME" which is
> totally meaningless.

That's referring to memory and not cores; is that a realistic example? I'm not
very aware of Nvidia marketing that does what you said specifically - the
example feels maybe a little exaggerated? I will totally grant that there is
marketing speak, and understanding the marketing speak for _all_ tech hardware
can be pretty frustrating at times.

> if they're like "3% more performance on the 3090 vs. the RTX Titan" then I
> can just ignore it and not even bother reading the reviews.

Nvidia does publish some perf ratios, benchmarks, and peak perf numbers with
each GPU, including for specific applications like Blender. Your comment makes
it sound like you haven't seen any of those?

Anyway, I think that would be a bad idea to ignore the reviews and benchmarks
of Blender and your favorite games, even if you saw the headline you want.
There is no single perf improvement number. There never has been, but it's
even more true now with the distinction between ray tracing cores and CUDA
cores. It's very likely that your Blender perf ratio will be different than
your Battlefield perf ratio.

~~~
jrockway
I haven't seen any of those. All I've seen is a green-on-black graph where the
Y axis has no 0, they don't say what application they're testing, and they say
that the 3070 is 2x faster than the 2080 Ti. Can you link me to their
performance numbers? As you can tell, I'm somewhat interested. (And know that
real reviews arrive tomorrow, so... I guess I can wait :)

~~~
lpghatguy
The official press release of the 3000 series[1] has a graph that seems to be
what you're looking for. Look for the section named "GeForce RTX 30 Series
Performance".

It has a list of applications, each GPU and their relative performance. Y=0 is
even on the graph!

[1]: [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-
rtx-30...](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-
rtx-30-series-graphics-cards/)

~~~
jrockway
Ah, OK, I saw that. I am just very suspicious of the fact that they didn't use
"fps" as the units, and instead chose "relative performance".

