Nvidia creates new CPU engineering unit in Intel's Israeli backyard

pcgamer.com:

Nvidia is intent on shoving its way into CPUs, one way or another. Today the supermassive GPU company announced it will create a CPU design and engineering group in Israel, and is intent on hiring hundreds of engineers for the job.

With its ongoing purchase of chip designer Arm, you could say Nvidia has a keen interest in CPU development, and even for a GPU company such as Nvidia, that's not particularly surprising. The CPU is a key component of Nvidia's datacentre aspirations, where general-purpose processing smarts are very much still required, even if the overall system requires GPU to do most of the computational heavy-lifting.

Nvidia's DGX Station A100, for example, connects four Nvidia A100 GPUs to AMD's 7742 EPYC server chip.

There's also Grace, Nvidia's first datacentre CPU. This Arm-based processor will find its way into Nvidia-powered supercomputers for the Swiss Supercomputer Center and US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory.

So for massive computing projects, a CPU is key. And I'm sure Nvidia would love to cut other companies, especially a competitor like AMD, out of its server rack. Nvidia's purchase of Mellanox helped to do just that, and its ongoing attempts to purchase Arm may eventually be to its benefit, too.

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That doesn't mean we'll see Nvidia roll out a lineup of gaming CPUs anytime soon, however. Nvidia admits it has its work cut out for it competing with Intel and AMD's x86 processors in any form, and actually used this as a reason why it should be allowed to buy Arm.

Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger also appeared unphased by Nvidia's Grace