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Damn, I called this a while ago. With Intel and AMD focusing on x86 and being behind on the competition, it makes so much sense that Nvidia would break into the processor space.
Also announcing this one day before the Qualcomm event is both funny and evil. Excited to see some good ARM laptops that aren't Macbooks.
NVIDIA wasn't shy about this. They tried to buy ARM. They design the Tegra chip that is in the Switch.
And the Switch is basically just a rebranded (... with shittier plastic) Nvidia Shield X1 or whatever the number was.
Jensen et al have very openly been making inroads with ARM devices for the better part of a decade at this point.
I had a tablet once, with an nVidia Tegra SOC. Once they were the fastest Arm chips around.
Yeah. I was actually really looking forward to the Shield X1 (or whatever it was) until it fell off the face of the earth for a few months and suddenly whatever the switch's codename was had the exact same specs. Just a worse display, cheaper feeling plastic, and controller holders that break if you use them too much.
I tend to fall on the AMD side of things on PC, but I'm glad to see things getting shook up on the ARM side. I'd love to see AMD and NVIDIA go ham on RISC-V, but that's a much bigger risk right now, and probably needs another 10 years of refinement to hit the efficiency of ARM.
I must admit, I never understood the use case for Shield. All I heard about was something about game streaming, as in running games from servers. Not a use case I personally found interesting. Google tried that too, and failed badly.
The switch however had the huge benefit of Nintendo IP, and was a natural extension of previous Nintendo systems.
However, I can clearly understand your disappointment if you hoped for a more versatile system.
The shield is one of the best android boxes on the market, as one of its major features is upscaling videos using its notibly faster gpu compared to standard android boxes. With support for a wide amount of surround sound options, it is still virtually the best android streaming box for videos and games.
The shield tv was such a dominant amdroid box that nvidia fundamentally didnt change its soc simce 2015, outside of the die shrink from 20nm to 16nm that allowed for the upscale feature in the 2019 model and the better battery life in newer switches.
In 2015 it was also fast enough to do pretty decent big screen games rendered locally, too. I mean, like other person pointed out, its internals were powerful enough to have been (heavily) used for the Switch which hundreds of millions of people are still having fun with.
That was one of the reasons several people I know bought it.
For me it was more that I wanted an android tablet and that was pretty much the only good option. been a minute, but I want to say the Samsungs were still insanely expensive and the kindle fires were already a hot mess.
These days, Samsung actually have lower tier tablets that go on sale often enough that you can SORT of justify an android tablet. But it is still a god damned mess.
They tried to buy ARM.
Just for market dominance I assume.
They design the Tegra chip that is in the Switch.
Yes, but that chip is old. It was already a bit outdated when the switch came out, and that was 2017.
Just for market dominance I assume.
Almost certainly. I'm glad they failed to buy it. It would have been a mess in the long run, but clearly they have plans for ARM.
Yes, but that chip is old. It was already a bit outdated when the switch came out, and that was 2017.
Correct, but they do work with ARM already. I'm guessing they will be making the chip for the Switch 2, which will probably be out of date when it comes out in 2024, but it will be a more modern chip.
Nvidia's ARM play has always been primarily in AI and vehicles. Tegra has a number of successors — just not in consumer devices.
AMD is developing ARM CPUs too according to the same article but less details are available.
AMD will likely jump on ARM, too. They're somewhat tied to the Intel architecture--x86-64 is their baby--but not as much as Intel themselves.
Why arm instead of risc-v though?
Because Windows on ARM is already a thing with some momentum.
Also, Nvidia has made ARM chips in the past.
Not nearly as mature, but I'd be shocked if they're not working on it. It doesn't make sense to talk about it at this time, still lots of buzz around ARM.
Aren’t these for servers?
Microsoft wants other ARM laptop options for Windows than just Qualcomm.
The primary reason the company I work for is using a QC chip over any other ARM offering is the GPU they bought from ATI. The CPU cores aren’t particularly interesting
If AMD or nVidia release a SoC, it would likely be a strong contender for our next design
Competition in the CPU space ♥♥♥
Didn't they try this already with Tegra?
Hey, I've seen this one before
Hopefully they update the 4 year old Shield soon 😭
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nvidia has quietly begun designing central processing units (CPUs) that would run Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Windows operating system and use technology from Arm Holdings(O9Ty.F), , two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers, according to preliminary third-quarter data from research firm IDC.
At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Executives at Microsoft have observed how efficient Apple’s Arm-based chips are, including with AI processing, and desire to attain similar performance, one of the sources said.
In 2016, Microsoft tapped Qualcomm to spearhead the effort for moving the Windows operating system to Arm’s underlying processor architecture, which has long powered smartphones and their small batteries.
Software developers have spent decades and billions of dollars writing code for Windows that runs on what is known as the x86 computing architecture, which is owned by Intel but also licensed to AMD.
The original article contains 635 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
