Nvidia to Challenge Intel with Arm-Based Processors for PCs
bloomberg.com
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Nvidia and Qualcomm are just so... Nvidia and Qualcomm like. They can't help themselves.
That being said, history also suggests AMD will bungle the software side.
Consider a senior SWE at e.g. NVIDIA making $300k, let's say halfsies split between base and RSU. The $150k RSU grant from a few years ago that still hasn't fully vested is worth $1M now. So even for a 50% increase in nominal total comp, it doesn't make financial sense to switch.
I don't know that anyone can afford to pay their engineers 10x more than the competition, and then also offer a cheaper product with thinner margins.
In my experience, pretty much all software engineering positions pay better than hardware engineering positions with equivalent experience. I don't fully understand why, as hardware is hard and if you have a really good hardware engineering team you can shave months off your time to market, so those engineers should be just as valuable to a business as systems/embedded software people.
Based on that people end up earning what they consider "a comfortable wage". Some people are not going to feel comfortable until they can buy a jet for their acro-flying hobby, some are happy when they can afford to easily save 1 year of income and being able to afford to buy a new pc every 3 years.
Other people have no idea these opportunities exist and they are miserable working in one place for a decade. Or they are not willing or can't take risks.
That's how we end up with two people doing similar jobs one earning $100k and the other $500k. In days of remote work the biggest differentiating factor in the earning potential IMO is your English (if not a native speaker) and willingness to work in timezones 6h+ away.
I think it has to do with the VC faucet, a completely irrational capital allocation mechanism.
But you are right; the hardware market is harder than making web stuff. I just enjoy hardware/firmware more. Currently I am starting a new hardware/firmware project for a US company that will last 3 years with this income.
It depends where you live, spend and how you count; i optimised everything for the past 25+ years around making sure I never have to think about money if I would drop everything today. Your situation might be very different of course.
That disrupts the organization because the hardware people are arguably smarter and more talented than software people. They have actual engineering degrees.
A good software org has to value its people. A good hardware org is a manufacturing operation tries to minimize personnel costs.
NVIDIA also shipped Tegra SoCs with their own Denver cores, but they scrapped the project
AMD is cheaper (less power too for the same performances), so for my NAS and laptop it's my choice, and probably if I had to build a gaming computer I would use AMD too.
It is impossible to find: AMD + high resolution screen (3840x2400) + 120hz + OLED. In the last year even the Intel ones downgraded though, everyone went 3200x2000 @ 120hz OLED.
It's just frustrating when you're looking at upper-end AMD laptops and you cannot find 16GB of memory, or a decent screen. I'm glad they can dish out $500-$800 laptops, but I don't know why OEMs are always pairing the good components with Intel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Allegations_by_the_Europ...
This is not correct. Just looking at Lenovo (and surely, there are similar machines from other brands), even a mainstream laptop like the Yoga 7 14" AMD ships 16 GB, and it has a 2.8K OLED display as option. If you want more, the T14(s) can ship with 32 GB and matte display.
AMD do offer solutions, its the vendors that ignored Navi and insisted on supplying power guzzling 3060 instead. Blame the customers for that.
Good laptop with 3 flaws - should have been 16:10, and the touchpad driver is terrible, and power supply is a brick. Fix these and you would have had oerfect laptop.
Given the nature of their laptops, even if the laptop you want isn’t there yet it’s only a matter of time before you get the module that you want
Need me some 2160p or 2400p @ 120hz OLED. I'm often in hotel after hotel after hotel and I don't have a docked setup. I just have the 1 laptop. Certainly not toting around a high-end portable monitor for this need, you can't find 120hz OLED anyway. Another poster linked how Intel influenced what OEMs were offering with AMD CPUs and I think that's exactly what's going on. When you go to Dell.com you can very easily see the many options for Intel-CPU'd laptops, and the handful or less of AMD options for screen configurations, hard drives, memory, or graphics cards. It's just very fishy.
If Microsoft releases an equivalent of Rosetta at the same level of quality it will be a different story. But I can't see what influence Nvidia has over this?
Microsoft has had their own Rosetta equivalent for a few years now. In theory application compatibility is more comprehensive than Rosetta as it supports much older applications, including 32-bit applications. In practice (likely as a result of trying to support so much more stuff) application compatibility isn't as rock solid as Rosetta for every application.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
Microsoft doesn't have access to these instructions for their own implementation (because they are not ARM standard), but theoretically they could have qualcomm or other SoC providers add some custom hardware that does the same. But in a fragmented landscape that can be hard, some windows laptop SoCs might have it, some might not.
And as time goes on, more and more OEMs would probably favor adding the hardware support because people would prefer to buy the ones with faster x86 emulation.
Nvidia is a software company, but i doubt they want to deal with making decades of windows binaries work.
If Microsoft is serious about ARM, there's no reason they couldn't work together to ensure the CPU is optimized for Microsoft's emulation layer.
Isn't Nvidia already doing this with their drivers? Games are notorious for suboptimal or downright incorrect graphics API calls that get patched in the graphics driver on a per-game basis - at least for the AA games in the past.
They don't write Haskell, Postgres, Rust, Java, Scala, Firefox, Spotify, VS Code, Postico or any number of the other software that I run.
They (Apple) released _their_ software and the necessary tools to make it possible for all the software vendors to port all their code in their time, basically. But it all ran (runs!) on both Intel and ARM, still.
Microsoft is a software company. Nvidia is a hardware company.
Although they don't have the tight integration that Apple has, there might not be the limitations apple adds.
The games that aren't recompiled will (after 2 years or so) fall far enough behind in requirements compared to the state of the art, that the emulation will be fast enough to play those older games.
HOWEVER MS does have an ace -- they can make the next xbox an ARM machine. This will guarantee that all game devs either migrate to ARM or face being on an emulator with reduced capabilities. That will create the needed tech. But it will also help Apple... so MS is likely to try to avoid it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/129jzv4/overwatc...
Starfield should be barely playable if someone manages to get it to run(game requires x86 instructions rosetta doesn't currently support). With M3 around the corner it should be very playable, which falls in line with the 2 year timeline.
There is a massive difference between developers just needing to press the "Build" button again (with no code or config changes), and requiring developers to manually add support for both architectures the hard way.
There is a very low tolerance for incompatibility and ARM, whilst great in controlled environments, just cannot compete with Intel architecture in compatibility.
I suspect a lot of games will not run but everything else works fine. This includes x64 (x86 64-bit software).
Also, MS has made a lot of their software ARM compatible. Office 365, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio code all have native ARM binaries. In Visual Studio's case, it has fewer features than the x64 version (mostly fewer supported SDKs).
Overall, I can't tell I am even running on an ARM system because it feels like an x64 system. It is responsive, fast and just works.
Which you cannot even buy anymore, because they discontinued it after 9 months (10/2022-07/2023) [1]
Microsoft's commitment to Windows on ARM (WoA) is a joke.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/10/16/window...
However the Windows developer community couldn't care less if it doesn't bring more money home, and Microsoft isn't Apple, backwards compatibility matters.
Meanwhile, much legacy software that hasn't made this transition often comes from an age of much lower performance and so can afford the penalties of emulation against modern hardware. Other legacy products are continually aging out and being retired for other reasons.
There are always exceptions, but Intel doesn't have the nearly the security it once did.
With Nvidia, AMD, and MS pushing, most new releases will probably have an ARM release, and older games can run with translation. The main problematic niche is older releases that are very CPU bound (like some sim games).
Games are the most optimised code there is.
Translation layers might cut it with vintage games but not with anything modern.
They JIT the x86 code to arm and their codegen is good enough to maintain most of native performance. Each new release brings them closer to closing the gap.
Where's your cutoff for vintage?
Portal 2 is demanding enough of a real-time FPS to demonstrate the principle and FEX is only becoming more optimized. It won't be long until it's running AAA games on low settings.
They seem to care a great deal about their hardware and gamer teenagers also seem to spend alot more time analysing hardware and milliseconds performance advantages than anyone else. They literally care about mouse latency in milliseconds.
They spend a huge amount of time on YouTube and online forums talking gaming hardware. If the word on the street is that ARM is milliseconds slower than Intel then they won't buy it. There's lots of huge YouTube channels that do nothing but measure game performance on various hardware.
Gaming is no longer dominated by affluent teenagers. At least not to the degree it once was.
The gaming community may care about numbers but I don't know if most actually know what those numbers say.
Oof.
A lot of the people who only need those things have largely already moved away from the PC desktop. (Especially if we don't include "laptop" in the "Intel will be hard to displace on the desktop" statement, which I'm not sure if the OP meant to include or not. But even if we include laptops, a lot of people have already moved away to tablet or non-Wintel-land.)
The remaining things, though? Generally not highly abstracted. There's the highly-tuned-for-amd64 performance side of things, and then the legacy/slow dev cycle side. I'm skeptical on the legacy side that there's a good business to be built on trying to move those users to a different architecture. Everybody's special weird setup is gonna be different enough with lots of random one-off external hardware or other such requirements I don't see good universal solutions that could scale.
It's not a growth business anymore but it's decline is slowing, I think.
It also moved towards Docker and Rust.
It will be hard but not impossible. If (for example) Nvidia were to produce a product with a tight integration between CPU/GPU - both technically and price wise that could be used to create a very competitive gaming PC (perhaps low to mid end) then worked with a few gaming companies so the major games worked on it. Made sure Windows and the basic office apps, Chrome, Firefox etc. worked well there would be a market, especially if the ARM chip gave a noticeable performance boost over a similarly priced Intel.
Real competition in this space would be really good. The shape of mass computing is inceasingly a tortured collusion game rather than a true market.
Anybody who used a raspberry pi knows that the desktop computing landscape is not what it used to be. For peanuts you can have a rock-solid linux PC that covers the computing needs of like the 99% of people.
With a convergent OS you'd also cover the mobile use case, where conveniently Arm is already the norm.
The future will not look like the past but speculators beware, timing earthquakes is not possible.
Unless you want to play videogames, Linux ARM is probably preferable to Intel.
Just not a lot of benchmarks here that reflect what happens in the real world unfortunately
Fascinating developments though... we would all benefit from chipsets converging towards a similar architecture.
Is this "PC" processor still aiming for data centres or desktops? It's not surprising at all if it's the former one.
I'd be interested in more recent SoCs from them
Even still, my basest of base 32GB M1 Studio actually games pretty well in the few games that are really properly optimized for it (e.g. arm native, vulkan)
If we look at what Apple has done with their ARM chips, outside of power consumption they rarely win on performance. It is mostly software optimized to use their specialized hardware compute block that get any advantage from Apple Silicon. Their ARM CPU are not that special, especially since they make it hard to sort CPU from GPU and other hardware co-processor. When you go look in detail in the various benchmark numbers you realize the CPU part performs at most like a mid-range laptop CPU. And their GPU (that gets used to "win" some CPU benchmark) is weak when you consider the price but admittedly that is not going to be a problem for NVidia.
People say Apple successfully transitioned but it is mostly because they leave no choice to their customers. In other words, they do not have to compete. I doubt they would have sold much Apple Silicon desktop if those were to compete with equivalent Intel + dGPU machines; particularly considering the price premium. Compared to the golden iMac era, it seems like they do not sell much of them in the first place, and it sort of makes my argument.
NVidia will not have this luxury that Apple has. They will have to compete on both performance and price. Apple did not really succeed; I doubt they will. But maybe their chip designers are so much better than Apple's or less focus on power consumption will allow them to unlock more performance from ARM. But this is old history, and it seems to just repeat itself. Apple just went back to their Motorola "G" days where they pretend that they are competitive but in fact when you do run software that exists cross platform and is not unfairly optimized for the Apple platform it is rarely true. NVidia won't be able to create a marketing spin around this and still sell their stuff at a massive premium. It is unlikely that PCs will switch to ARM because there are not that many benefits but quite a bit of hassle and cost involved.
It is like the rotary engine that has some advantages over traditional piston engines but in the end are very rarely worth the tradeoffs which is why it is stuck in niche applications (at best, mostly unused actually).
Guessing you mean something more than they're own Linux distro too?
They need some sort of emulation.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
Its rapidly reaching the point where Windows is the least useful most foibled way to run Windows apps. No one can make a Steam Deck that works a third as well, and that's 90% because everyone else relies on Windows.
If you need anything other than a pure desktop form factor, it feels like Windows is a bad fit. It's unknown how long Windows can remain the top desktop option. And app emulation is great elsewhere.