Nvidia has revealed that its highly-anticipated Grace CPU Superchip is set to feature in a range of new servers launching in the first half of 2023.
The new systems – from the likes of Asus, Gigabyte, Supermicro and others – will be based on four new 2U reference designs teased by Nvidia at Computex 2022.
The messaging coming out of Nvidia suggests the company believes the new Arm-based servers powered by Grace will complement existing systems on the market, far from rendering x86-based offerings obsolete.
Nvidia Grace CPU Superchip
Unveiled at GTC 2022 earlier this year, the Grace CPU Superchip is comprised of two Grace CPUs linked up via high-speed NVLink interconnect, in a similar fashion to Apple’s M1 Ultra.
The result is a 144-core monster with 1TB/s of bandwidth and 396MB on-chip cache that Nvidia claims will be the fastest processor on the market for workloads ranging from AI to HPC and more.
“A new type of data center has emerged – AI factories that process and refine mountains of data to produce intelligence,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, when the new chip was first announced.
“The Grace CPU Superchip offers the highest performance, memory bandwidth and Nvidia software platforms in one chip and will shine as the CPU of the world’s AI infrastructure.”
With concrete timelines now revealed for the launch of the first Grace CPU Superchip-powered servers, excitement will begin to gather around the new Nvidia chips.
The four reference designs are each specced out to cater for specific use cases, from cloud gaming to digital twins, HPC and AI. Nvidia says the designs can be modified easily by partners to “quickly spin up motherboards leveraging their existing system architectures”.
Although many of the largest names in the server market have already expressed intent to build Grace-based systems, Nvidia will hope there is more to come in the months ahead.
- This year, Computex is once again virtual, but we’ll still be bringing you all the breaking computing news and launches as they happen, so make sure you check out all of TechRadar’s Computex 2022 coverage