I agree with you, mostly. Margins in the datacenter are thin for some players. Not Nvidia, they are at like 60% pure profit per chip, including software and RnD. That will have an effect on how we design stuff in the next few years.
I think we’ll need both ”GPU” and traditional CPUs for the foreseeable future. GPU-style for bandwidth or compute constrained workloads and CPU-style for latency sensitive workloads or pointer chasing. Now, I do think we’ll slap them both on top of the same memory, APU-style á la MI300A.
That is, as long as x86 has the single-threaded advantage, RISC-V won’t take over that marked, and as long as GPUs have higher bandwidth, RISC-V won’t take over that market.
Finally, I doubt we’ll see a performant RISC-V chip from China the next decade - they simply lack the EUV fabs. From outside of China, maybe, but the demand isn’t nearly as large.
AMD APU approach already bearing fruit, PlayStation, Xbox, steam deck, strix halo, and their instinct datacenter cards, show that one chip approach is good as you’ve said
I agree with you, mostly. Margins in the datacenter are thin for some players. Not Nvidia, they are at like 60% pure profit per chip, including software and RnD. That will have an effect on how we design stuff in the next few years.
I think we’ll need both ”GPU” and traditional CPUs for the foreseeable future. GPU-style for bandwidth or compute constrained workloads and CPU-style for latency sensitive workloads or pointer chasing. Now, I do think we’ll slap them both on top of the same memory, APU-style á la MI300A.
That is, as long as x86 has the single-threaded advantage, RISC-V won’t take over that marked, and as long as GPUs have higher bandwidth, RISC-V won’t take over that market.
Finally, I doubt we’ll see a performant RISC-V chip from China the next decade - they simply lack the EUV fabs. From outside of China, maybe, but the demand isn’t nearly as large.
AMD APU approach already bearing fruit, PlayStation, Xbox, steam deck, strix halo, and their instinct datacenter cards, show that one chip approach is good as you’ve said