I do wonder if we will see these chips available for purchase to install in standard form factor ATX style systems? This is something I haven’t seen Arm crack into yet.
I think ATX style machines are very niche. Gamers love them and 3D artsits, but outside of that I think no one wants them anymore. I think that ARM-compatibility for games in the near term is a hard sell (although Blender, Maya, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro have been ported to ARM for running on Apple chips.)
I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.
Nvidia should really be able to do both. Their integrated solutions like Orin scale up to a certain point, but the demand for modular compute is still enormous on the server side (and enthusiast market). Given that CUDA will support both going forward, I don't think there's a technical incentive to kill the market.
My guess is that Nvidia will have a line of mobile cores/chipsets for integrators that want them, while also offering PCI-enabled boards for gamers and enthusiasts. Even Apple can't outrun the demand for a PCI-enabled machine, and they don't even support eGPUs. Nvidia's incentive to abandon ATX (or at least modularity) is even slimmer.
I think you’re right about the class of device. MS can’t just treat ARM-based products the way it does now and make a leap in terms of end-user experience - wondering if this changes in the future.
bhouston|2 years ago
I think the market that NVIDIA should be chasing with the ARM CPUs + good GPUs is business machines. Our company is filled with very poor performing Window Surface devices - outside of those who insist on Macs this is what people get. Companies are spending a lot on these. And they desperately need better performance while also being cool with long battery life.
smoldesu|2 years ago
My guess is that Nvidia will have a line of mobile cores/chipsets for integrators that want them, while also offering PCI-enabled boards for gamers and enthusiasts. Even Apple can't outrun the demand for a PCI-enabled machine, and they don't even support eGPUs. Nvidia's incentive to abandon ATX (or at least modularity) is even slimmer.
xh-dude|2 years ago