Teeing off an AI-heavy slate of announcements for NVIDIA, the company has confirmed that their Grace Hopper “superchip” has entered full production. The combination of a Grace CPU and Hopper H100 GPU, Grace Hopper is designed to be NVIDIA’s answer for customers who need a more tightly integrated CPU + GPU solution for their workloads – particularly for AI models.
In the works for a few years now, Grace Hopper is NVIDIA’s efforts to leverage both their existing strength in the GPU space and newfound efforts in the CPU space to deliver a semi-integrated CPU/GPU product unlike anything their top-line competitors offer. With NVIDIA’s traditional dominance in the GPU space, the company has essentially been working backwards, combining their GPU technology with other types of processors (CPUs, DPUs, etc) in order to access markets that benefit from GPU acceleration, but where fully discrete GPUs may not be the best solution.
The flipside of AMD’s move to a server APU, yes?
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Intel’s Jeff McVeigh was recently throwing shade on integrating CPU and GPU during his ISC presentation. As background, the old Intel roadmap had the now shipping Ponte Vecchio GPU in 2022, an upgrade to this called Rialto Bridge in 2023, then an APU called Falcon shores planned for 2024. About a month back Intel announced Rialto Bridge is canceled, and Falcon shores has been redefined as GPU only. I view this as a way to slip Rialto Bridge a year, without calling it a slip; Intel has been getting a lot of grief over slipping programs so might be a little sensitive here.
His argument is that the market is still immature and the correct ratio of CPU to GPU is still in flux. Keeping them separate in the box allows the customer to pick whatever ratio they want.
I view Intel as either saving face, or making excuses but I don’t put much value on what they have to say here. I also think AMD will have success with the MI300 in the supercomputer space, but see little adoption in the broader markets.
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I view Intel as either saving face, or making excuses but I don’t put much value on what they have to say here.
Probably the right read. Other people I know who know the company well received the announcement the same way.
