Monday, September 24th 2012
NVIDIA to Take on Xeon and Opteron with a "Boulder"
The enterprise CPU market is about to flare up soon, with the introduction of a third player in high-performance chips, next to Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron. X-bit Labs unearthed plans by NVIDIA to build on its Tegra success by designing high-performance server processors based on the ARM machine-architecture. The server market is far more varied in terms of machine-architectures, than PC, and the addition of an ARM-based high-performance chip is unlikely to fail. NVIDIA reportedly codenamed its development "Project Boulder."
Due in 2014, the CPU built under Project Boulder will be designed to, at least initially, replace traditional x86 Xeon/Opteron CPUs in Tesla Compute Accelerators, machines loaded with Tesla GPUs to process complex computational problems. The Boulder chip will be designed to handle serial processing loads, leaving parallel loads to the GPUs. A lot could ride on Boulder's success, as it could motivate NVIDIA to address other computing segments.
Source:
X-bit Labs
Due in 2014, the CPU built under Project Boulder will be designed to, at least initially, replace traditional x86 Xeon/Opteron CPUs in Tesla Compute Accelerators, machines loaded with Tesla GPUs to process complex computational problems. The Boulder chip will be designed to handle serial processing loads, leaving parallel loads to the GPUs. A lot could ride on Boulder's success, as it could motivate NVIDIA to address other computing segments.
22 Comments on NVIDIA to Take on Xeon and Opteron with a "Boulder"
soon ill be buying a fridge with an nvidia logo.
any competition is better than less competition as well... if this pushes AMD and Intel to be even more competitive i'm all for it, regardless of WHO is behind the move.
maybe one day they will branch into the high performance desktop CPU market, i'd probably never buy one unless they just came out with something amazing but again if it pushed AMD and intel to be more competitive and excel their products even more then i'm all game.
Er, sort of. Nvidia is better equipped than VIA to cause a ruckus in the CPU duopoly. Remember when Nvidia was doing motherboard chipsets? Yeah...
I can only see NVIDIA competing in specialized environments. Intel and AMD will continue to dominent the generalized market where they need to handle any task given with as little fuss as possible. It really is no different than NVIDIA's Tesla--some use it but most don't.
Given project denver is similar and they have said there next gpu will contain an Arm core this is a natural progression and exactly what i and others said would happen.
now wheres Avonx, he needs to read this,, :p
oh and on die gpu elements dont do ivybridges video handling any harm , or trinity for that matter , id count that as actual use.:)
Making Tegra GPU or next gen Boulder to handle serial computing is a lot of burden for programmer, it is possible but still a long way to anything feasible..
ARM+Tegra = new high performance server CPU?? even AMD with a huge early start in APU (x86 + GPU) still have many difficulties in making programmer to fully support and take the real performance advantage of unified computing of APU.
This is a referance to Project Denver which was announced in a Q&A by Jen-Hsun Huang at 2011 Computer Electronic ShowLook up the transcript from the event.
Some other fun quotes from 2011 CES about Project Denver.