
NUVIA: New Server CPU Startup Going After Intel and AMD - l31g
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15115/nuvia-breaks-cover-new-startup-to-take-on-datacenter-cpu-market
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CalChris
Well, NUVIA has to first design something with a competitive advantage over
Intel's chips, then they have to manufacture it and then they have to sell it.
Those are three separate and hard problems.

With the first problem, they can simplify things considerably by paying an ARM
tax. The RISC-V tax is less ($0) but then it offers them less as well. If they
design their own ISA, well, good luck with that. Also, clouds like tweaks, so
one size won't fit all.

With the second problem, there's fab space to be had for sufficient coin. But
there's more to manufacturing than filling out a webform and sending a tape
with a check.

If they can get past the first two hurdles and actually deliver silicon which
is significantly better than Intel's then marketing to the big clouds should
be the least problematic.

Gonna take some money and time. Gulati left Google in March.

~~~
smaddox
> hard problems

Understatement of the year. The number of man hours Intel has sunk into
optimizing each of these boggles the mind. And this is coming from someone who
worked there for 2 years.

~~~
rusticpenn
Maybe I am naive but Intel has a lot of legacy baggage, perhaps a design from
scratch can make it simpler.

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djsumdog
I feel like to succeed here, you need to make an offering that can immediately
run either a mainline Linux kernel or a totally open fork (with the intent of
getting committed to mainline) and making sure all the major toolchains can
build and run on it.

Unless there's a minimum friction to migrate, most companies won't make the
effort even if they can save a few $100 per server. It takes me back to
Intel's VLIW attempt with Itanium/EPIC. Even when they got compilers up to
snuff, too many high end tasks (video encoding) either required special
instructions or were written in assembly that couldn't easily be ported to
EPIC instructions.

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mkj
Clever name, simultaneously looking like NVIDIA but sounding like Via
resurrected.

~~~
kube-system
Via still exists. Maybe they could have gone with Nucyrix? Although that kind
of sounds like a prescription drug.

~~~
djsumdog
I think Via owns all the IP for Cyrix. If there's no partnership here, I
wonder if VIA is going to hit them with a trademark dispute.

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neftaly
Someday someone is gonna make a bunch of money selling CPUs implementing a
WASM VM ("death of javascript") and/or lambda calc (Reduceron) in hardware.

~~~
_nhynes
Wasm itself doesn’t have any environment functions that would allow things
like managing page tables or networking. I think that what you might see is a
RISC-V JIT with a ring-0 Wasm runtime compiled to native. Kind of like
[https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet](https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet),
probably

~~~
FullyFunctional
The interesting thing about WASM is that it's an amazing representation[1] to
translate from; certainly much more attractive than binary translation from a
legacy ISA (maintaining the illusion of the original ISA carry a substantial
tax). As thus, it allows you freedom to innovate something radically
different, like TRIPS/EDGE radical.

I'd much rather translate from that than create the compiler backend and the
entire toolchain.

[1] It's not perfect alas, as there are still many things the compiler knows
that is lost in translation, such as the complete static alias sets of memory
operations, true range limits on values, etc. For some of this we burn power
today trying to (re-) discover at run-time (like the memory disambiguator).

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justicezyx
This is mostly hype, but I am guessing they will adopt an accelerator approach
for modern server computing in a data center. There are a few canonical
computing pattern inside modern data center:

Data crunching Fungible is already on that

Distributed services a lot of fan in and fan out some kind of chips that can
combine IO networking and moderate general computing instructions can be
useful

Massive code data storage

Catching servers?

Overall, I see no reason to take AMD Intel heads on... It's not necessarily
anyway, no one needs a third x86 player. We want to have true architecture
disruptor...

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m0zg
I really hope this is a RISC-V play of some sort. Otherwise I don't see how
they can win. Apple does better ARM than anyone. Given the level of
investment, nobody is going to out-Apple Apple in this area. Beefy, cheap,
power efficient, legacy-free RISC-V, now that's something I'd be interested
in.

~~~
detaro
Doesn't really matter to the server market what Apple is doing unless they
start selling it.

~~~
m0zg
That's true. But there are other strong competitors if you want to ship ARM
into the datacenter. And crucially they are already selling to the likes of
AWS, where you can go right now and spin up an ARM instance using their
products. It's incredibly difficult to get something like AWS to depend on a
product by a startup which could go out of business tomorrow.

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shmerl
Would be interesting if they'll develop totally new micro architecture and ISA
from scratch.

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dddw
ok, let's see what they bring to the table

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rolltiide
Ugh that name

Nybody want to

NUke them from high orbit?

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wademealing
I have a feeling that its a CPU designed with side-channel attacks in mind.
Could be Intel, could be ARM.

