During last month’s GTC 2021 event, NVIDIA unveiled Grace, its first Arm-based data center CPU said to be capable of delivering 10x the performance of today’s fastest servers. Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser doesn’t seem to be a fan of the chip, however, alleging that it’s a clear case of the company showing that it will compete unfairly. Hauser claims that NVIDIA is creating a “proprietary interface between its Arm server chip, Grace, and their graphics processing unit” in an attempt to lock customers into their products.
NVIDIA hit out at the claims, saying that Mr Hauser “does not understand what Grace will do or its benefits to Arm.” He said Grace would be focused on high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, and would work with chips from every data centre supplier including Graphcore. A spokesman said: “We have been working on Grace using off-the-shelf Arm technology, available to all Arm licensees, long before we agreed to acquire Arm.”
Sources: The Telegraph, Hardware.info