NVIDIA expands its ecosystem, flexes its software muscle, and takes a bet on new processors, workloads, and use cases. The developments paint a new picture in the AI chip race in the cloud and the edge.

NVIDIA made a number of important announcements today at SC19. First, NVIDIA introduced a reference design platform that enables companies to quickly build GPU-accelerated Arm-based servers, driving a new era of high performance computing for a growing range of applications in science and industry.

Second, it introduced NVIDIA Magnum IO, a suite of software to help data scientists and AI and high performance computing researchers process massive amounts of data in minutes, rather than hours. In a third announcement, NVIDIA announced the availability of a new kind of GPU-accelerated supercomputer in the cloud that is available on Microsoft Azure.

Let’s unpack the announcements and what they mean for NVIDIA, and the data and compute ecosystem at large.

Lately, Intel’s near monopoly in the data center is under threat. Besides AMD, who has managed to stick around as an alternative to Intel CPUs, there is new competition from Arm. Arm processors have up to now mostly been used in mobile phones and edge compute scenarios, owing to their low power consumption.

Although Arm processor performance may not be on par with Intel at this point, their frugal power needs make them an attractive option for the data center, too, according to analysts. AWS was the first to play on that strength in 2018, adding new instances utilizing Arm CPUs in its arsenal. With newly announced support for Arm CPUs, NVIDIA achieves a number of things.

First, NVIDIA future proofs itself, and strengthens its ecosystem and its software platform. By embracing Arm, NVIDIA lets cloud vendors and data center managers everywhere know that they can expect NVIDIA GPUs to run seamlessly whatever CPU they may use. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, made that clear:

“There is a renaissance in high performance computing. Breakthroughs in machine learning and AI are redefining scientific methods and enabling exciting opportunities for new architectures. Bringing NVIDIA GPUs to Arm opens the floodgates for innovators to create systems for growing new applications from hyperscale-cloud to exascale supercomputing and beyond.”

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