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NVIDIA Unveils Grace: A High-Performance Arm Server CPU For Use In Big AI Systems
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[Image: Image%20-%20Grace_678x452.jpg]

Kicking off another busy Spring GPU Technology Conference for NVIDIA, this morning the graphics and accelerator designer is announcing that they are going to once again design their own Arm-based CPU/SoC. Dubbed Grace – after Grace Hopper, the computer programming pioneer and US Navy rear admiral – the CPU is NVIDIA’s latest stab at more fully vertically integrating their hardware stack by being able to offer a high-performance CPU alongside their regular GPU wares. According to NVIDIA, the chip is being designed specifically for large-scale neural network workloads, and is expected to become available in NVIDIA products in 2023.

With two years to go until the chip is ready, NVIDIA is playing things relatively coy at this time. The company is offering only limited details for the chip – it will be based on a future iteration of Arm’s Neoverse cores, for example – as today’s announcement is a bit more focused on NVIDIA’s future workflow model than it is speeds and feeds. If nothing else, the company is making it clear early on that, at least for now, Grace is an internal product for NVIDIA, to be offered as part of their larger server offerings. The company isn’t directly gunning for the Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC server market, but instead they are building their own chip to complement their GPU offerings, creating a specialized chip that can directly connect to their GPUs and help handle enormous, trillion parameter AI models.

More broadly speaking, Grace is designed to fill the CPU-sized hole in NVIDIA’s AI server offerings. The company’s GPUs are incredibly well-suited for certain classes of deep learning workloads, but not all workloads are purely GPU-bound, if only because a CPU is needed to keep the GPUs fed. NVIDIA’s current server offerings, in turn, typically rely on AMD’s EPYC processors, which are very fast for general compute purposes, but lack the kind of high-speed I/O and deep learning optimizations that NVIDIA is looking for. In particular, NVIDIA is currently bottlenecked by the use of PCI Express for CPU-GPU connectivity; their GPUs can talk quickly amongst themselves via NVLink, but not back to the host CPU or system RAM.The solution to the problem, as was the case even before Grace, is to use NVLink for CPU-GPU communications. Previously NVIDIA has worked with the OpenPOWER foundation to get NVLink into POWER9 for exactly this reason, however that relationship is seemingly on its way out, both as POWER’s popularity wanes and POWER10 is skipping NVLink. Instead, NVIDIA is going their own way by building an Arm server CPU with the necessary NVLink functionality.

The end result, according to NVIDIA, will be a high-performance and high-bandwidth CPU that is designed to work in tandem with a future generation of NVIDIA server GPUs. With NVIDIA talking about pairing each NVIDIA GPU with a Grace CPU on a single board – similar to today’s mezzanine cards – not only does CPU performance and system memory scale up with the number of GPUs, but in a roundabout way, Grace will serve as a co-processor of sorts to NVIDIA’s GPUs. This, if nothing else, is a very NVIDIA solution to the problem, not only improving their performance, but giving them a counter should the more traditionally integrated AMD or Intel try some sort of similar CPU+GPU fusion play.

By 2023 NVIDIA will be up to NVLink 4, which will offer at least 900GB/sec of cummulative (up + down) bandwidth between the SoC and GPU, and over 600GB/sec cummulative between Grace SoCs. Critically, this is greater than the memory bandwidth of the SoC, which means that NVIDIA’s GPUs will have a cache coherent link to the CPU that can access the system memory at full bandwidth, and also allowing the entire system to have a single shared memory address space. NVIDIA describes this as balancing the amount of bandwidth available in a system, and they’re not wrong, but there’s more to it. Having an on-package CPU is a major means towards increasing the amount of memory NVIDIA’s GPUs can effectively access and use, as memory capacity continues to be the primary constraining factors for large neural networks – you can only efficiently run a network as big as your local memory pool.

And this memory-focused strategy is reflected in the memory pool design of Grace, as well. Since NVIDIA is putting the CPU on a shared package with the GPU, they’re going to put the RAM down right next to it. Grace-equipped GPU modules will include a to-be-determined amount of LPDDR5x memory, with NVIDIA targeting at least 500GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Besides being what’s likely to be the highest-bandwidth non-graphics memory option in 2023, NVIDIA is touting the use of LPDDR5x as a gain for energy efficiency, owing to the technology’s mobile-focused roots and very short trace lengths. And, since this is a server part, Grace’s memory will be ECC-enabled, as well.
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