Jensen Huang’s vision for data center dominance may destroy the Arm ecosystem

I have very much the same opinion, and I think that Huang is at least aware of that.

> Nvidia would probably pursue a similar strategy -- sell chips with lots and lots of cores and lease capacity on demand.

But this will be pretty much the same IBM thing. Some banks, and Oracle/SAP buyer types may buy in, but that will be it. It does not change anything to how the companies in the above list of "big iron" vendors attempted to do it before.

I want to remind that Huang is also, a very big "investment relations" player, and he likes to make an impression of "grandiose" plans to impressionable investor guys.

I personally feel like distributed (coherent) shared memory is a bit overkill. I would much rather the kind of grain that a solid 10gbps link works well with. I.e. anything that is sensitive to latencies measured in microseconds or lower just lives on the same node where it needs to be sampled.

I can't think of too many applications that couldn't be designed to work just as well using 10GbE vs Infiniband/RDMA/shared memory. Even most real-time simulations could be designed to run in a practically syncrhonous fashion across a number of distributed hosts using stuff you can buy at Newegg or Amazon.

They have extensive contracts in place. It's not like ARM instruction set is provided to nVidia and then they can just revoke it because they don't like nVidia.

I don't know what those perpetual licenses look like, but, if there are any strings attached at all, perhaps Nvidia can tug on them in order to apply a little good old-fashioned embrace-extend-extinguish to ARM? Extend ARM with new instructions that offer performance improvements when you've bought 100% into Nvidia hardware, maybe, and then stifle competition by making them implement these features in order to claim ARM compatibility, thereby making it more difficult/expensive for anyone else to pair ARM CPUs with other companies' GPUs?

The are big players in Internet business, but they are not big enough consumers to benefit economically from owning chips. Even if they will be all combined, they will not be even a double digit of top tier Xeon buyers.

And this is partly the reason why AMD was so keen on playing ball with them. AMD among other things was making a proprietary CPU for Amazon, which the later discarded. It was later rebranded Seattle, and thrown on the open market.

In addition to selling hardware, it seems like ARM-owning Nvidia would probably be happy to sell whatever amazing new ARM cores they cook up to whoever is willing to pay to use the design. It's not obvious RISC-V will benefit from any of this. Somebody, somewhere would need to create equally amazing RISC-V cores and find a way to sell them.

Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback. Programs like EAC and dbpoweramp support it. I use it for my music collection on my phone, at half the size of mp3 it sounds completely transparent to me with my earbuds.

And there are only some Linux special variants for it.

And in teaching. If you're going to get a sophomore to build their first 3 stage RISC pipeline or a senior their first OoO machine with register renaming then RISC-V's consistent design removes a lot of unnecessary distractions.

I assume people are using it in research too. If I were to redo my thesis on improving adder efficiency today I'd probably look at using an open source RISC-V design as a base.

I'm skeptical of RISC-V's ability to succeed as an application core like ARM's A series or modern x86. But none the less I'm bullish on it having an important future.

But RISC-V is thriving in other areas like industrial controllers, and Alibaba Cloud just announced a few days ago they are using it in a new server processor, positioned as an eventual competitor to AWS Graviton.

Topically: Nvidia uses RISC-V in some GPUs as a controller (not the GPU core). Not sure if those are released yet, but they gave a presentation on it at a recent RISC-V meet-up.

But ISA still matters. Switching from Intel to AMD likely isn't much of a switch, but switching to a different ISA in the datacenter will continue to be an uphill battle.

As the article notes, the uphill battle will take longer for RISC-V and if Nvidia follows the strategy laid out they hope to profit in the intervening gap.

The team size I see on the photo don't give off much confidence about them pulling that out.

Saving a few pennies is fine, but it hardly seems like a game changer.