from Hacker News

NUVIA: New Server CPU Startup Going After Intel and AMD

by l31g on 11/15/19, 7:20 PM with 37 comments

• by CalChris on 11/17/19, 8:41 PM

  Well, NUVIA has to first design something with a competitive advantage over Intel's chips, then they have to manufacture it and then they have to sell it. Those are three separate and hard problems.

  With the first problem, they can simplify things considerably by paying an ARM tax. The RISC-V tax is less ($0) but then it offers them less as well. If they design their own ISA, well, good luck with that. Also, clouds like tweaks, so one size won't fit all.

  With the second problem, there's fab space to be had for sufficient coin. But there's more to manufacturing than filling out a webform and sending a tape with a check.

  If they can get past the first two hurdles and actually deliver silicon which is significantly better than Intel's then marketing to the big clouds should be the least problematic.

  Gonna take some money and time. Gulati left Google in March.

• by djsumdog on 11/17/19, 9:24 PM

  I feel like to succeed here, you need to make an offering that can immediately run either a mainline Linux kernel or a totally open fork (with the intent of getting committed to mainline) and making sure all the major toolchains can build and run on it.

  Unless there's a minimum friction to migrate, most companies won't make the effort even if they can save a few $100 per server. It takes me back to Intel's VLIW attempt with Itanium/EPIC. Even when they got compilers up to snuff, too many high end tasks (video encoding) either required special instructions or were written in assembly that couldn't easily be ported to EPIC instructions.

• by mkj on 11/16/19, 2:45 AM

  Clever name, simultaneously looking like NVIDIA but sounding like Via resurrected.

• by neftaly on 11/16/19, 1:38 PM

  Someday someone is gonna make a bunch of money selling CPUs implementing a WASM VM ("death of javascript") and/or lambda calc (Reduceron) in hardware.

• by justicezyx on 11/18/19, 12:16 AM

  This is mostly hype, but I am guessing they will adopt an accelerator approach for modern server computing in a data center. There are a few canonical computing pattern inside modern data center:

  Data crunching Fungible is already on that

  Distributed services a lot of fan in and fan out some kind of chips that can combine IO networking and moderate general computing instructions can be useful

  Massive code data storage

  Catching servers?

  Overall, I see no reason to take AMD Intel heads on... It's not necessarily anyway, no one needs a third x86 player. We want to have true architecture disruptor...

• by m0zg on 11/17/19, 9:13 PM

  I really hope this is a RISC-V play of some sort. Otherwise I don't see how they can win. Apple does better ARM than anyone. Given the level of investment, nobody is going to out-Apple Apple in this area. Beefy, cheap, power efficient, legacy-free RISC-V, now that's something I'd be interested in.

• by shmerl on 11/17/19, 8:42 PM

  Would be interesting if they'll develop totally new micro architecture and ISA from scratch.

• by dddw on 11/16/19, 12:12 AM

  ok, let's see what they bring to the table

• by rolltiide on 11/18/19, 1:40 AM

  Ugh that name

  Nybody want to

  NUke them from high orbit?

• by wademealing on 11/18/19, 2:04 AM

  I have a feeling that its a CPU designed with side-channel attacks in mind. Could be Intel, could be ARM.