Nvidia's Grace processor will challenge Intel's dominance in data centers

Nvidia's Grace processor will challenge Intel's dominance in data centers
Nvidia announced this week that it will launch a new data center processor, Nvidia Grace, based on the Arm architecture that will directly challenge the computing dominance of Intel servers and data centers. The announcement, made during the Nvidia GTC 2021 virtual event keynote by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, is Nvidia's latest step into the processor market and aims to capture some of the most lucrative processor sales to the world. promising a tenfold increase in prosecution. performance in data centers using the combination of Nvidia Grace processors and Nvidia Ampere GPUs. Nvidia Grace is expected to launch in early 2023. Data center sales already account for about 40% of Nvidia's revenue, according to Bloomberg, and a single data center processor can cost more than €10,000 (about €7,275 / AU€13,115) or more, and large-scale computing cloud hubs like Amazon and Google. they use several thousand processors, and the demand for cloud computing is growing exponentially. Named after pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, Nvidia Grace is designed to work alongside Nvidia GPUs, especially Ampere, to better handle the kind of intractable bottlenecks that accompany today's data center architectures. Huang said Grace would be capable of a SPECInt (the measure of a processor's full processing power) of 2,400 on an eight-GPU Nvidia DGX server system, while the current SPECInt rate for most fast DGXs is . only 450 using an Intel processor.

Grace is bad news for Intel and AMD, very bad

Unsurprisingly, shares of Intel and AMD are down several percentage points on the news, and it's not hard to see why. Intel currently has over 90% of the server processor market share with its Xeon processors. AMD has tried to break into this very profitable market with its EPYC series of processors, but has yet to make significant progress. With Nvidia entering the fray with a new server processor that far outperforms Intel and AMD processors, Intel and AMD stand to lose out in one of the fastest growing technology sectors. This is particularly bad news for Intel, which saw the dominance of server-side processors bring in €7.2 billion in revenue in 2019 (about €5.24 billion / AU$9.4 billion) according to S&P. Global. For context, this alone surpassed AMD's overall revenue in 2019, at $6.7 billion (about $4.87 billion / A$8.79 billion). Intel obviously has the most to lose here and if Grace delivers the kind of performance gains the company promises, Intel better start offering something that can compete or else it can be expected. Fighting with AMD over a a very distant second. in the years to come.