During Nvidia’s fourth quarter 2021 earnings call last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang did his best to hide his disappointment over the dissolution of the company’s acquisition of Arm, saying Nvidia still has big plans to leverage Arm chip architectures.
This is especially true of Project Grace, the Arm-based CPU development that Nvidia announced in the spring of 2021 at a time when the prospects for the already-announced Arm acquisition was starting to draw anti-competition concerns.
Huang said during the earnings call, according to the Motley Fool transcript, that Nvidia is busy with Arm on multiple fronts, including its plans for the Arm-based Orin system-on-chip for autonomous vehicle and robotic applications. Huang said Orin is in production, and is “going to drive an inflection point starting in Q2 but accelerating through Q3 and the several years after as we ramp into all of the electric cars and all of the robotic applications and robotaxis and such.”
Specifically regarding CPUs, he said in response to an analyst question about Grace, “We also have Arm projects with the CPU that you mentioned, Grace. We have Grace, and we surely have the follow-ons to Grace, and you could expect us to do a lot of developments around the Arm architecture. One of the things that's really evolved nicely over the last couple of years is the success that Arm has seen in hyperscalers and data centers. And it's really accelerated and motivated them to accelerate the development of higher-end CPUs. And so, you're going to see a lot of exciting CPUs coming from us. And Grace is just the first example.”
He added that customer response to the Grace CPU has been strong in the last 10 months or so since it was unveiled. At the time of the unveiling, some sector analysts wondered if Grace could be something of a hedge strategy against the possibility of the Arm acquisition not passing regulatory muster.
For example, Leonard Lee, founder and managing director of neXt Curve, presciently asked in a story he contributed to Fierce Electronics shortly after the Grace launch if the new CPU was “a sign of doubt” in the acquisition that “could undermine Nvidia’s case to acquire Arm. It highlights the anticompetitive threat that Nvidia can present if it begins to directly compete with Arm customers and ecosystem partners who are eyeing the enterprise data center and emerging edge cloud market.”
Now, with the deal dead, Nvidia is touting its plans to continue leveraging Arm architectures, and Grace is looking like a big CPU launching pad for a company more known for its GPUs.
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