In November 2019, the corporate NUVIA broke out of stealth mode. Founded by former senior Apple and Google processor architects, John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams III, the corporate got here crashing out of the gate with fairly appreciable targets to revamp the server market with an SoC that would supply ‘A step-function improve in compute efficiency and energy effectivity’. Today NUVIA is placing extra knowledge behind these targets.
The press launch we acquired from NUVIA takes a while to cowl a few of the fundamentals of the trendy day server market, and it initially learn nearly like an AnandTech article, which is eerily scary. Suffice to say, NUVIA understands the present state of play of the server market, together with the place Intel and AMD stand with respect to one another, and the way x86 choices are squaring up in opposition to the opposite choices in the marketplace. As with most components of the server market, completely different verticals typically have completely different necessities, on compute, reminiscence, IO, energy, or bodily constraints, in addition to preliminary price of {hardware} alongside complete price of possession. To that finish, NUVIA’s processor designs, in response to the corporate, ‘an SoC that can ship industry-leading efficiency with the best ranges of effectivity, on the identical time’.
With that, NUVIA is saying that its first technology CPU core might be referred to as Phoenix and be constructed upon the ARM structure (probably Armv9) with an structure license. Phoenix might be a part of the Orion SoC, with NUVIA stating that they’re implementing ‘a complete overhaul of the CPU pipeline’. Gerard William’s designs from Apple are identified to be significantly completely different to what we’ve seen elsewhere out there, so we suspect that that is going to be an enormous a part of the key sauce behind Orion and its Phoenix cores.
NUVIA goes on to say that Phoenix is ‘a clear sheet design’, specializing in single core efficiency management and maximizing reminiscence bandwidth and utilization. The Orion SoC might be constructed to concentrate on excessive utilization and sustained frequencies, with out having to depend on high-turbo advertising and marketing numbers, to permit prospects to make the very best use of the {hardware} inside allotted energy and cooling budgets. Alongside this, NUVIA is stating that there might be {hardware} infrastructure constructed to specification ‘to help peak efficiency on actual cloud workloads’.
NUVIA’s Numbers
The huge a part of the press launch is NUVIA’s performance-per-watt claims. To do that, NUVIA is utilizing Geekbench5 as a efficiency indicator, together with direct energy measuring, of present in-market x86 and Arm choices. NUVIA is taking smartphone and cell based mostly cores, similar to Intel Ice Lake, Qualcomm SD865, AMD Ryzen 4700U, in addition to Apple’s A12Z Vortex and A13 Lightning, as beginning factors. The motive for that is that NUVIA believes there may be beginning to change into no significant distinction between smartphone/cell cores and server cores when extrapolated – provided that you begin including in huge vector engines for particular prospects does that change into related.
According to NUVIA’s numbers, that is the place the present market stands with respect to Geekbench 5. At each level, ARM’s outcomes are extra energy environment friendly/greater performant than something obtainable on x86, although on the excessive finish Apple and Intel are nearly equal on efficiency (for 4x the facility on Intel).
NUVIA notes that energy of the x86 cores can range, from 3W to 20W per core relying on the workload, nonetheless within the sub 5W bracket, nothing from x86 can come near the facility effectivity of high-performance Arm designs. This is the place Phoenix is available in.
NUVIA’s declare is that the Phoenix core is ready to supply from +50% to +100% peak efficiency of the opposite cores, both for a similar energy as different Arm…
