NVIDIA is building ARM-based processor code name ‘GRACE’ which targets the AI and HPC communities. After AWS’s Graviton processor, it seems ARM is making serious inroads into the data center and cloud segments.
NVIDIA announced its first data center CPU, an Arm-based processor that will deliver 10x the performance of today’s fastest servers on the most complex AI and high performance computing workloads.
The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace™ CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world’s most advanced applications — including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing — that analyze enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory. It combines energy-efficient Arm CPU cores with an innovative low-power memory subsystem to deliver high performance with great efficiency.
Grace is a highly specialized processor targeting workloads such as training next-generation NLP models that have more than 1 trillion parameters. When tightly coupled with NVIDIA GPUs, a Grace CPU-based system will deliver 10x faster performance than today’s state-of-the-art NVIDIA DGX™-based systems, which run on x86 CPUs.
While the vast majority of data centers are expected to be served by existing CPUs, Grace — named for Grace Hopper, the U.S. computer-programming pioneer — will serve a niche segment of computing.
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are the first to announce plans to build Grace-powered supercomputers in support of national scientific research efforts.