Hacker News Reader

Comment by gchadwick | Hacker News Reader

It'd be interesting to know if NVidia are going for an ARMv9 core, in particular if they'll have a core with an SVE2 implementation.

It may be they don't want to detract from focus on the GPUs for vector computation so prefer a CPU without much vector muscle.

Also interesting that they're picking up an arm core rather than continuing with their own design. Something to do with the potential takeover (the merged company would only want to support so many micro-architectural lines)?

View on HN

This has got me wondering whether an Nvidia owned Arm could limit SVE2 implementations so as not to compete with Nvidia's GPU. That would certainly be the case for Arm designed cores - not a desirable outcome.

I doubt it, it's not like the market for acceleration is stagnant and saturated and they need to steal some marketshare points from one side to help the other.

It's all greenfield and growing so far, they'll win more by having the very best products they can make on both sides.

You'd think. But it wouldn't be the first time a new product is hampered to not slightly theoretically cannibalize an existing product family.

They have said clearly that the core is licensed from ARM and one of the Neoverse future models.

There was no information whether it will have any good SVE2 implementation. On the contrary they insisted only on the integer performance and on the high-speed memory interface.

Neoverse V1 has SVE, Neoverse E or N do not.

"E" is efficiency, N is standard, V is high-speed. IIRC, N is the overall winner in performance/watt. Efficiency cores have the lowest clock speed (overall use the least amount of watts/power). V purposefully goes beyond the performance/watt curve for higher per-core compute capabilities

Neoverse-N2 will have SVE2 (source https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/config/aar... )

Here's Anandtech's article on the previous Neoverse V1/N2 announcement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16073/arm-announces-neoverse-... arm weren't saying anything official but Anandtech did a little digging and reckons V1 is SVE 1 and v8 and N2 could be Armv9 with SVE 2.

I'd suspect NVidia would be using the V1 here as it's the higher performing core, but not way to be certain.

I think they will use SVE2 because I assume they'll need to perform vector reads/writes to NVLink connected peripherals to reach that 900GB/s GPU-to-CPU bandwidth metric they described.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com