Nvidia Drops the other Shoe

NVIDIA Shows Beefy Arm CPUs Battling x86 Servers For A100 GPU-Powered Cloud AI Dominance | HotHardware

Earlier, Nvidia announced their intention to produce their own ARM laptops, and the only sticking point is some judge questioned whether they can buy an ARM company that specializes in processors. The idea that Nvidia can't buy a processor company and compete directly with Intel and Microsoft is something only a lawyer could dream up, and smells of the Pentagon playing politics.

Anyway, now they've exposed more of their hand with their new server chips. Normally, server chips are developed and, then, butchered to produce consumer products. What's special about these chips is that they use slower processors than Intel and AMD, but still produce high speed results, using "accelerators". These are analog circuits that can save the processor work and speed up the whole cpu. Notably, such accelerators take up less space individually, require less energy, work faster, etc., but require more space overall on the chip. However, Nvidia specializes in larger chips, and the newest chips can hold up to 60 billion transistors, and saving space on a chip is no longer much of a concern.

Basically, your whole computer should be analog for the best results, but analog logic is largely unexplored territory the supercomputers are about to spit out the math for, and Nvidia is getting a jump on the competition. If we are lucky, AMD or Intel will come out with a new distributed computing architecture, that makes Nvidia look like a flash in the pan. Such a distributed computing architecture would eliminate every complaint you ever had about computers, leaving the internet the last bastion for whining and complaining about being exploited by the industry.