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Nvidia Mulls Cheap, Integrated x86 Chip
CWmike writes "Nvidia is considering developing an integrated chip based on the x86 architecture for use in devices such as netbooks and mobile Internet devices, said Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia during a speech that was webcast from the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week. Nvidia has already developed an integrated chip called Tegra, which combines an Arm processor, a GeForce graphics core and other components on a single chip. The chips are aimed at small devices such as smartphones and MIDs, and will start shipping in the second half of this year. 'Tegra, by any definition, is a complete computer-on-chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power and very small but highly efficient,' Hara said. 'Someday, it's going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well.'"
For those of us who dealt with intel's "integrated" graphic cards on laptops for the past several years now... on their behalf I just want to say PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SHINY AND SILICON, DON'T DO IT! Anything with the word "integrated" near it makes me want to cringe... it's a post traumatic stress response caused by watching a myriad of good video games shutter, blink, crash, and burn right in front of me. It's a black day indeed when Warcraft 3 can't run at full resolution on a laptop produced only a year ago.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Nvidia develops a very basic x86 CPU thats tightly coupled to one of their embedded GPUs that doesn't implement any x86 technology that's still currently patent-protected. The basic x86 CPU acts as a shim for software that expects to talk to an x86 CPU and offloads as much as possible to the significantly more advanced GPU running the bulk of the load. The end result? An x86-compatible embedded system that vastly outperforms anything currently on the market that doesn't violate anyone's active x86 patents.
read:
"Nvidia NULLS Cheap, Integrated x86 Chip "
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
1. Microbenchmarking becomes too difficult when two or more cores of different types are used
2. Inter-core communication takes a hit because you'll end up designing new flit routers (or even newer protocols) that efficiently route packets within cores that have different communication topology
3. Failure of one core can render the chip useless, whereas in the case symmetric multicore design, failure of one core means other cores are still functional and the company can market them separately.
4. Production issues involving 1,2, and 3 above.
Eventually we'll end up with a dynamic multicore design which seems more promising than asymmetric designs. Some research has been done in this area (symmetric vs. asymmetric vs. dynamic via threading): http://www.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/papers/tr1593_amdahl_multicore.pdf
FreeBSD bounties
Why botther at all? Better go straight to x64, I mean, even the lowliest of nvidia GPUs is already 64 bits, why bother with 32 bits technology?
You aren't allowed to call them netbooks, didn't you get the subpoena?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My Intel 855GM handles xterms very well, recently they have become very wobbly slimey when I drag them around in Gnome, other than that everything is fine with my integrated chip.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
Surely a better design is to produce a series of very small, highly specialized, very fast cores on a single piece of silicon, and then have a layer on top of that which makes it appear to be an x86, ARM or whatever.
One reason for having a bunch of specialist cores is that you don't have one core per task (GPU, CPU or whatever), but rather one core per operation type (which means you can eliminate redundancy).
Another reason is that having a bunch of mini cores should make the hardware per mini core much simpler, which should improve reliability and speed.
Finally, such an approach means that the base layers can be the same whether the top layer is x86, ARM, PPC, Sparc or a walrus. NVidia could be free to innovate the stuff that matters, without having to care what architecture was fashionable that week for the market NVidia happens to care about.
This is not their approach, from everything I'm seeing. They seem to be wanting to build tightly integrated system-on-a-chip cores, rather than having a generic SoaC and an emulation layer. I would have thought this harder to architect, slower to develop and more costly to verify, but NVidia aren't idiots. They'll have looked at the options and chosen the one they're following for business and/or technical reasons they have carefully studied.
If I was as bright as them, why is it that they have the big cash and I only get the 4 digit UID? Ergo, their reasoning is probably very sound and very rational, and if presented with my thoughts could very likely produce an excellent counter-argument to show why their option is logically superior and will produce better returns on their investments.
The question then changes as follows: What reasoning could they have come up with to design a SoaC unit the way they are? If it's the "best" option, although demonstrably not the only option, then what makes it the best, and what is it the best at?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A Beowu.... aww fuck it.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
They should just push ARM heavily. ARM is doing great right now. Companies like Texas Instruments are pushing the architecture heavily, and there's high demand.
Linux ARM support is blasting ahead, thanks to projects like the Beagleboard.
On top of that, a while ago Microsoft said they were developing an ARM version of Windows. Although we won't see it right away, in a couple years that'll open up even more options.
If they push ARM hardware heavily enough, software will follow. Heck, the software is already coming along, so they just have to market the hardware properly.
Most people won't know the difference between a linux MID and a windows MID. Both have "Email", "Instant Messenger", "Calendar", "Web Browser", etc., and if you need a new program you just download it... Nobody would even think of installing software off a CD, so most "Why won't this work?" scenarios won't even come up. It'll just look slightly different.
And once a couple game devs follow - or heck, a program like Google Earth - it won't be long before oodles of software is being ported, and the ARM-x86 barrier breaks down.
So, instead of forging ahead with novel parallel processor technology, Nvidia thinks that the way to go is to copy last century's dinosaur CPU? It's enough to make a grown man cry. Whoever is in charge of research at Nvidia should be given the boot. What a waste of talented engineers! But it's not too late, Nvidia. Click on the link below and do the right thing. Otherwise, Otellini will tear you a new one and you know it.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
On a different note, did not Nvidia recently say that the world is moving away form the CPU? I am beginning to think that Nvidia is either scared or bluffing. Otellini made a comment last week to the effect that Nvidia needs a CPU in order to build a GPGPU heterogeneous multicore processor and now there's all this talk about an Nvidia x86 coming out in a couple of years. Does Otellini call the shots at Nvidia? I am not so sure.
Nvidia is right that the days of the CPU are numbered but so are the days of the GPU. The reason is simple. Neither CPU nor GPU provides a universal or homogeneous solution to the parallel programming crisis. The heterogeneous route is pure folly too, if only because it does nothing to solve the crisis. In fact, it makes it worse because it combines two incompatible parallel models on the same dye. A match made in hell.
There is way to solve the crisis but it involves neither CPU nor GPU. Think pure MIMD vector processing. That's where Nvidia should invest its processor R&D resources, all of it. That is, if it wants to dominate the parallel computing industry for the next several decades. Intel would not know what hit it until it's too late. Big money is at stake. BIG.
This is good for competition
Wow, you mean Obama can walk on water, heal people with his hands and change water to wine too? That is amazing! Who knew that the president really is the most powerful man in the world.
If you KNOW the x86 will be deployed with a good GPU, you can skip the MMX, SSE, and other recent ISA additions presumed to be patent-encumbered. The question is whether you can do without some of the other OS support features in the ISA which are too recent to be freely implemented.
However, the hurdle here is that x86-compatible no longer means i386 to most people. Pre-compiled OS and application binaries may now unfortunately assume the presence of many newer ISA extensions and fail to work without them. Once you have to recompile, how much benefit is there to x86 versus ARM or anything else in the lightweight/embedded market?
NOT all PCIe slots are created the same. The one in laptops is fairly small and there is no reason it can't be smaller still, after all, the connector standard is just there so all cards can be produced to fit in all slots. PCIe itself doesn't care what the slot is like or even if it is a slot at all, you could solder it on. Then it is integrated but still a real graphics card.
What the above parent by the way is talking about has really nothing to do with integrated or not but just with crap implementations. Usually because a laptop maker takes shortcuts and uses fake busses or once that are hopelessly scaled down until you are left in a "modern" machine with less throughput then a telex machine.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I ran into a limit with 32 bits more than 10 years ago.
My Fortran compiler was Cray derived (Lahey, iirc), and I had dynamically allocated a huge array. They were in some way bit-addressed, leading to a crash.
I turns out that my adviser's machine had more memory (512Mb) than any of their own test machines.
The workaround at the time was static allocation, which made the code faster, anyway.
hawk
There is no need to worry that Nvidia will be making crappy crappy main processors (much like intels crappy crappy video processors). Intel didn't try to emulate anyones technology (we could tell that right away), however Nvidia is trying to emulate intels technology, for which they need a license. Now the big N pissed the big I off bigtime a few years ago, and the prospects of a license coming from the big I are far far less than 0. So no need to worry. It will never happen.
This just in, nVidia announces world's first netbook to require not one but two separate AC adapters at all times. Other features include built-in vacuum cleaner noise generator, and thermal pubic hair remover.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
It seems that everything is moving in the direction of operational efficiency. More instructions per cycle, less power draw, faster and more efficient buses among processor, memory and peripheral devices are among important issues being focused on.
But what ever happened to Moore's law? Are we already outside of its prediction? Has the chain been broken? I thought we would all have 5GHz machines running ice-cold by now but some of the latest and greatest stuff is a mere 1.6GHz atom processor based sub-notebook. Is power and speed out of vogue or is it just not as possible as it once was and so people are drawing attention in other directions hoping people have forgotten about Moore?
If you produce great GPU cores with all the SIMD goodness you need, does it really matter if your x86 core has SIMD extensions? Just run the basic x86 code and let the media driver software offload the rest of the processing to the GPU cores.
The real question here is what kind of software is going to be hosted, and what ISA requirements does it really have (and which cannot be easily changed). It may still be easier to cross-compile existing x86 software to a slightly reduced ISA than to port legacy stuff to ARM? Only time will tell, I guess.
Problem is that more and more netbooks are sold with linux, and NVIDIA drivers integration in any distro is less than stellar. Contrast that with Intel hardware where everything is well supported by all vendors.
Unless they open their drivers, this platform will be Windows-only so even their lower-end models will be hampered by the Windows Tax.
That won't go very far.
Would NVIDIA be able to do a Transmeta? Seeing that their GPUs are supposed to be more and more CPU-like, maybe they could translate the whole x86 instruction set in software?
Intel recently announced it was making the Atom CPU core available for SoCs made in TSMC. NVIDIA has dealings with TSMC, as they only do design and outsource manufacturing. So theoretically NVIDIA could just use an Atom core as a base and slap a GPU on it, much like they did with Tegra with an ARM core.
It's a black day indeed when Warcraft 3 can't run at full resolution on a laptop produced only a year ago.
Yes it can! I have the screenshots to prove it!
(Had to turn the detail down slightly though...)
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I wish that some company would combine ARM and x86 into one chip already, so that a complete migration to a more efficient line of processors becomes possible.
DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about the feasibility of this.
I am not devoid of humor.