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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.'"
x86 in an instruction set and a bunch of semantics. The decoder takes about 1% of a modern CPU, and if you're able to lop this off and run it on a GPU or something for cheap, your software won't care.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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)
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.
Why bother with a license? The 386 patents are over, and the 486 patents ought to all be expiring right about now. So make the new chip a 486 clone. A really fast and modern 486 clone.
The demarcation of storage and RAM is a legacy constraint forced by hardware limitations. Ubiquitous 64-bit and SSD will blur and eventually totally eliminate this separation.
POKE 36879,8
Or external PCIe. I've been waiting for that. The PCIE standard has it specified, just nobody wants to make stuff for it. Think of it this way, you come home, you plug in a box (with its own PSU) into your laptop, and you can now game on your laptop with whatever cards you had put in that box. When you're done, unplug everything, switch your resolution/drivers if necessary, and go.
But what ever happened to Moore's law? Are we already outside of its prediction? Has the chain been broken?
Effectively, yes. The problem is not cost per gate and wafer real estate per gate, which continue to decrease. It's heat dissipation per unit area. I've been to semiconductor talks where there are charts of increasing heat dissipation with lines marked "room temperature", "soldering iron", "nuclear reactor", and "surface of sun". The trend is clear and not encouraging.
The effect is that computers of equivalent power continue to get cheaper (basically, a computer now costs $299 or less) but performance is leveling off.
At the high end, a few years ago there was talk of a cyrogenic petaflop supercomputer, but the justification wasn't there. That thing would have dissipated 4KW at liquid helium temperatures, with very elaborate cooling. Just getting signals out of the liquid helium without letting heat in is tough; the I/O has to be optical.
Density continues to improve for devices that don't use much power, like flash memory. But for CPUs, we're reaching the limits.
Some fundamental limits, like the size of atoms, are not that far away, but those haven't been hit yet. There's about an order of magnitude to go.
3D devices, with more layers, are promising in terms of density, but they're not cheaper, and the heat problem gets worse.