Following closely behind Apple, Nvidia has announced a dual processor ‘superchip’ to boost CPU performance in data centre AI applications.
The Grace ‘superchip’ combines two die with the NVLink-C2C interconnect to provide 144 high performance ARM v9 Neoverse cores and 1 Terabyte/s bandwidth to low power DDR5 memory in a single socket.
This is very similar to the Apple M1 Ultra, which combines two of its M1 Max Pro die with a high performance interconnect called UltraFusion: Apple goes to 2.5D for 114bn transistor M1 Ultra
The Grace CPU Superchip will have a total power envelope of 500W and will run all of Nvidia’s computing software stacks, including RTX, HPC, AI and Omniverse. The Grace CPU Superchip along with the ConnectX-7 NIC interface cards offer the flexibility to be configured into servers as standalone CPU-only systems or as GPU-accelerated servers with one, two, four or eight GPUs using the latest Hopper GPU architecture.
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Hopper is Nvidia’s latest GPU architecture which boosts the performance of TensorFlow AI models and adds dynamic programming. This is an algorithmic technique for solving a complex recursive problem by breaking it down into simpler subproblems. By storing the results of subproblems to avoid recomputing them later reduces the time and complexity of problem solving.
Hopper introduces DPX instructions to accelerate dynamic programming algorithms by 40X compared to CPUs and 7X compared to Nvidia’s previous Ampere architecture GPUs.
Last year Nvidia announced the Grace Hopper dual CPU + GPU chip that combines single Grace die with a Hopper die.
Unlike the Apple M1 Ultra which is available now, both the Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip are expected to be available in the first half of 2023.
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