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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

NVidia is awful when it comes to FLOSS support. If they get ARM, at least it may accelerate RISC V developments.

Nvidia is making a play for the data center business not the desktop business. Especially with its Mellanox acquisition, Nvidia wants to build high performance data centers (they have GPUs and networking but need CPUs since most computing is general purpose). I doubt that they'll succeed though since they don't have the software layer to provide the 'private cloud' that they are looking to build.

They basically want to run a cloud built around feeding enormous amounts of data to their GPUs, for AI operations and the like. This is also why they bought SwiftStack in March: to manage that storage.

Source: job interview

ARM isn't great, I don't see much difference in GPU documentation between the two.

This is true and fair. However ARM does a _lot_ of ecosystem open source support for their ISAs.

ARM makes GPUs?

I’m holding a reference copy of aarch64 in my hands and I’ve written half an assembler from it.

Granted SoCs often are just as bad as nvidia, but that’s not ARM’s fault or problem, really.

> ARM makes GPUs?

They do [1], but don't provide documentation for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(GPU)

Ah, I never made the connection before.

NXP (formerly Freescale) generally has good docs and tools for their iMX series SoCs. For some of them you have to sign up to get the reference manuals though.

you do realize that Nvidia is a major backer of RISC-V and already uses it on GPU's Turing and newer?

Yeah but they have no avenue to control it. Not like ARM and its ISA licensing.

RISC-V is inherently a customizable ISA though, whereas ARM implementations are very specific about what they require to be called an "ARM processor". This wouldnt change from this acq.

Would they tone it down if they acquired ARM?

no. they're isolated for a reason, with the RISC-V processor being used as the controller to manage the behavior of the other parts of the chip. beyond just licensing ARM is expensive because it's required to implement a lot. With that chip being RISC-V they can make it as minimal and perfectly tuned as possible, so it's slow when it can afford to be cheap and fast when it needs to be.

That isn't the same at all. Canonical being a major backer of Linux is significant, but Linux is significantly open and diversified to where it does not stand or fail by one party, abet there are some that have more influence than others.

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