Nvidia is building new Arm CPUs again: Nvidia Grace, for the data center

We’ve barely heard a peep out of Nvidia on the CPU front for years, after the lackluster arrival of its Project Denver CPU and its associated Tegra K1 mobile processors in 2014. But now, the company’s getting back into CPUs in a big way with the new Nvidia Grace, an Arm-based processing chip specifically designed for AI data centers.

It’s a good time for Nvidia to be flexing its Arm: it’s currently trying to buy Arm itself for $40 billion, pitching it specifically as an attempt “to create the world’s premier computing company for the age of AI,” and this chip might be the first proof point. Arm is having a moment in the consumer computing space as well, where Apple’s M1 chips recently upended our concept of laptop performance. It’s also...

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