Kicking off another busy Spring GPU Technology Conference for NVIDIA, this morning the graphics and accelerator designer is announcing that they are going to once again design their own Arm-based CPU/SoC. Dubbed Grace – after Grace Hopper, the computer programming pioneer and US Navy rear admiral – the CPU is NVIDIA’s latest stab at more fully vertically integrating their hardware stack by being able to offer a high-performance CPU alongside their regular GPU wares. According to NVIDIA, the chip is being designed specifically for large-scale neural network workloads, and is expected to become available in NVIDIA products in 2023.

With two years to go until the chip is ready, NVIDIA is playing things relatively coy at this time. The company is offering only limited details for the chip – it will be based on a future iteration of Arm’s Neoverse cores, for example – as today’s announcement is a bit more focused on NVIDIA’s future workflow model than it is speeds and feeds. If nothing else, the company is making it clear early on that, at least for now, Grace is an internal product for NVIDIA, to be offered as part of their larger server offerings. The company isn’t directly gunning for the Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC server market, but instead they are building their own chip to complement their GPU offerings, creating a specialized chip that can directly connect to their GPUs and help handle enormous, trillion parameter AI models…

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