From The Register, August 31:
Even when you think you're not buying Nvidia, you might still be buying Nvidia
The proliferation of custom AI ASICs, or XPUs, from OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others has led many to question Nvidia's grip on the market. After all, if everybody's building their own, who needs the GPUs the AI arms dealer has made its fortune on?
But Nvidia isn't concerned in the least and has instead invited its competition to raid – or, rather, license – the GPU giant's IP holdings, particularly those related to networking.
On Monday, MediaTek became the latest to embrace Nvidia's NVLink Fusion high-speed interconnect technology for its fledgling datacenter XPU offering. In exchange, Nvidia has invested $3.5 billion in convertible bonds issued by MediaTek. The GPU giant will also continue to license the Taiwanese SoC provider's own designs for use in future DGX and RTX Spark systems.
If you're curious, we explored MediaTek's datacenter ambitions last month. But the designer, best known for its Arm-based smartphone and tablet processors, is only one of several high-profile chip designers that plan to integrate the tech. Amazon, Fujitsu, Qualcomm, Arm, and Marvell are all on the same list.
NVLink Fusion started as a commercialized version of Nvidia's high-speed inter-GPU interconnect, introduced early last year. Initially, it was offered in two varieties: a chip-to-chip (C2C) variant for connecting CPUs to GPUs (or XPUs) in a memory coherent fabric, and a switched fabric used to stitch together multiple accelerators into one big logical rack-scale chip. It's since expanded to become the blanket offering by which Nvidia licenses its semiconductor IP.
Given how long it's taken Broadcom and others to develop competitive alternatives to NVLink, it's not surprising companies like MediaTek would license the tech, rather than reinventing the wheel, or piping alternative interconnects, like UALink, over regular old Ethernet.
By licensing Nvidia's NVLink Fusion tech, companies can focus on building competitive accelerators without worrying about how they're going to scale in production.
And because Nvidia's MGX rack designs are part of the Open Compute Project, MediaTek and its partners not only benefit from Nvidia's scale-up networking tech, but also can essentially take existing NVL72 racks and slot in their compute blades. This should dramatically reduce the system design and mechanical engineering experience required to go from silicon to AI racks.
And this isn't theoretical. Amazon is doing just that with its Trainium series of AI accelerators. As we wrote at the time, Amazon used Nvidia's MGX NVL72 reference design for its Trainium3-based rack systems launched last year. Meanwhile Trainium4, expected late this year, will ditch Amazon's in-house NeuronLink interconnect tech for NVLink Fusion.
Nvidia's cut
So, what does Nvidia get from letting rival chip designers piggyback off its hard-won networking tech?A lot more than licensing fees: It's also a way to keep companies hooked on its other products....
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Connecting it all together, very important.
Previously:
May 2015 - "Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVID)":
Among the fastest processors in the business are the one's originally developed for video games and known as Graphics Processing Units or GPU's. Since Nvidia released their Tesla hardware in 2008 hobbyists (and others) have used GPU's to build personal supercomputers.
Here's Nvidias Build your Own page.
Or have your tech guy build one for you.
In addition Nvidia has very fast connectors they call NVLink.
Using a hybrid combination of IBM Central Processing Units (CPU's) and Nvidia's GPU's, all hooked together with NVIDIA's NVLink, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is building what will be the world's fastest supercomputer when it debuts in 2018.
As your kid plays Grand Theft Auto....
March 2018 - "Connecting The Dots On Why Nvidia Is Buying Mellanox" (NVDA)
March 2026 - Connecting it all together: "Nvidia to invest $4 billion in two photonics companies" (NVDA; LITE; COHR)
Mr. Huang has said he wants to connect entire data centers together into one gigantic chip.
To do that you have to get latency between chips and then between servers as close to zero as possible.
From TipRanks, June 18:
Story Highlights
- Nvidia became the top vendor in data center Ethernet switching for the first time.
- IDC said Nvidia’s switching revenue jumped 193% year-over-year in the first quarter.
- The gain shows Nvidia is expanding beyond GPUs into a larger share of AI infrastructure spending....
If there is any money to be made from artificial intelligence Mr. Huang seems bound-and-determined that it go to Nvidia.
In other news, the move to optical and photonics from wires is real and accelerating.
From Nvidia's blog, June 16...
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