Arm announced the latest version of its Neoverse V-Series processor core and revealed Nvidia as a customer for the new product, saying that Nvidia already is using the Neoverse V2 in its previously-announced Grace CPU SuperChip architecture for the data center market.
The announcement almost serves as an appetizer to Nvidia’s GTC Fall event next week, where Nvidia is likely to provide an update on Grace, amid its usual overstuffed buffet of product unveilings and updates.
The Neoverse Demeter V2 will serve as the processor cores in the Grace CPU SuperChip, which will use 144 such processor cores. Further details can be found in this blog post.
The unveiling of the latest Neoverse version and its involvement in Nvidia’s Grace does not come as a surprise. Nvidia was using Arm before and for a long time was planning to acquire the company until that deal collapsed.
“Arm has probably been working on Neoverse 2 ever since Neoverse 1 was announced [in 2020], so not that surprising that key vendors like Nvidia would have gotten some sneak peeks at the technology even before others did,” said Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, via email.
That is also likely the reason Arm trotted out numerous customer testimonials, several of them from hyperscalers, such as Google and AWS, during a media pre-briefing earlier this week (the number and length of testimonials almost overshadowing Arm’s actual news announcement).
“Neoverse is a big deal for Arm as it tries to find new revenue streams,” Gold said. “So it is making a big deal about the companies building Neoverse-based products. Don’t forget that we’ve seen Arm licensees try to impact the server market for several years (and both Qualcomm and AMD, among others exiting after not being able to establish any real market share). And currently Ampere seems to be doing OK but others like Cavium didn’t make it.”
Meanwhile, Gold added, Intel and its x86 have had “a very tight grip on the server market.
In addition to announcing the Neoverse Demeter V2 this week, Arm also illuminated its product roadmap for the near future, saying it is working on a next generation N-Series CPU product, which is expected to be available to partners in 2023. This next N-Series CPU will deliver generational increases in both performance and efficiency over the market leading efficiency of N2, said Chris Bergey, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm.
The company also is planning a Neoverse E2 platform, which would be the next generation of its E-Series CPUs focused on data plane processing, 5G RAN, edge networking, and accelerators. The Neoverse E2 combines the Cortex-A510 CPU with the scalable Neoverse CMN-700 and N2 system backplane. This allows the best of cloud technology in constrained applications: a scalable range of core counts, SystemReady compatibility, and PCIe, CXL, IO and interfaces, Bergey said.