Qualcomm buy the Start-Up NUVIA for 1,4 billion US Dollar........................................Nuvia (a private company) has developped a new CPU architecture for Data Centers.
They first want to address the bottleneck problem in the cloud Data centers.
As [ Data Centers] workloads have grown in breadth and diversity, the right architecture has become a topic of intense debate. Is the workload compute-heavy? If so, which kind, integer or floating-point? Is the workload memory bandwidth limited? Is it I/O limited? What is the maximum allowable power dissipation? What are the physical constraints of the environment? These are some of the questions we continually ask ourselves at NUVIA. We work with our partners and customers to help answer these questions as we look at the workloads of the future and how to deliver them with maximum performance.The server CPU has evolved at an incredible pace over the last two decades. Gone are the days of discrete CPUs, northbridges, southbridges, memory controllers, other external I/O and security chips. In today’s modern data center, the SoC (System On A Chip) does it all. It is the central point of coordination for virtually all workloads and the main hub where all the fixed-function accelerators connect, such as AI accelerators, GPUs, network interface controllers, storage devices, etc. As workloads have grown in breadth and diversity, the right architecture has become a topic of intense debate. Is the workload compute-heavy? If so, which kind, integer or floating-point? Is the workload memory bandwidth limited? Is it I/O limited? What is the maximum allowable power dissipation? What are the physical constraints of the environment? These are some of the questions we continually ask ourselves at NUVIA. We work with our partners and customers to help answer these questions as we look at the workloads of the future and how to deliver them with maximum performance.Nuvia was created in 2019 by a team of Apple ingineers.
They rised first about 50 millions dollars and then 250 millions with very large companies and individual investors (DELL and the like...).
An interesting point is their focus to solve an important technical problem of the industry with a solution that can be immediately integrated in existing systems and devices.
But It is not clear at what point of developpment they were when Qualcomm dicided to take them over.
As we collect and analyze all these requirements, there is one factor that firmly remains unchanged as a significant metric to solve for: and that is the amount of performance delivered within a tightly controlled power budget. The power budget is a critical component of the Performance per Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) metric that most leading cloud providers use to assess their data center needs. Our focus at NUVIA is to develop an SoC that will deliver industry-leading performance with the highest levels of efficiency, at the same time. To do this, we are creating a server CPU that is built in a new way, with a complete overhaul of the CPU pipeline. Our first-generation CPU, code-named “Phoenix” will be a custom core based on the ARM architecture and central to our “Orion” SoC.And that they gave tested results (not published in details)
What We Tested
One of the best ways to demonstrate the dichotomy between the X86 and ARM solutions and NUVIA’s approach is to look at the performance versus power charts for each of the CPU architectures. An ideal workload will cover a variety of different types of use cases, both integer and floating-point, scalar and vector plus memory, and ensures that most of the power is consumed within the CPU complex. We believe Geekbench 5 is a good starting point, as it consists of a series of modern real-world kernels that include both integer and floating-point workloads. It runs on multiple platforms, including Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows. It also gives us the ability to conduct these tests on commercially available products that represent the best cross-section of the CPUs with the highest performance and best power efficiency within a thermally constrained environment. You may be wondering how we can make the extrapolation from smartphone and client CPU cores to a server core. In our view, there is no meaningful difference. If anything, these environments now deliver incredibly similar characteristics in how they operate. This has significant parallels to how the server landscape has evolved. In our testing, we run Geekbench 5 without the default pauses between subtests to get an accurate power measurement of the active workload.
https://nuviainc.com/blog/performancedeliveredanewwayIt seems that they develloped their CPU solution when they were still with Apple. That could explain the vey short time of developpement.
The price was 4,6 times the capital rised. But the company could still have a substancial amount of the money recently rised wich could pay Calquomm part of the take over price.
(20min delay)
(live)