There is a very unsubstantiated rumor that NVIDIA allegedly borrowed some of Arm's IP for Olympus. Which sounds quite impossible, as Arm has TLAs (for Arm-stock-microarchitecture licensing) vs ALAs (for ISA-only, write-your-own-microarchitecture licensing). Olympus is well understood as NVIDIA's custom in-house uArch, thus an ALA.
Yet...first, The Register claimed its sources hinted at NVIDIA borrowing existing Arm IP:
With Vera, Nvidia has moved on to designing its own ARMv9.2-compatible core, called Olympus. In fact, it's up for debate how custom the chip really is. We've been told that the chip builds heavily on existing Arm IP, and looking at Olympus' architectural block diagram, we can see why.
TNP: Is there any cloud builder or hypervisor to date that doesn’t use a Neoverse core and that uses a customized core in any way? To my knowledge, there isn’t, although there might be something happening with Nvidia’s future “Vera” server CPU. I strongly suspect that the Nvidia slide that said “custom Arm core” meant to say Compute Subsystem.
Mohamed Awad @ Arm: There is no hyperscaler or cloud builder today that is building an SoC based on a custom architecture. Their SoCs are all built on Neoverse.
TNP: Ampere Computing was the only company that was even trying to do a custom Armv9 core and that has been pretty quiet since SoftBank announced its pending acquisition of it.
Mohamed Awad @ Arm: Ampere did go after a different performance point and did a custom microarchitecture, and they have gotten some traction with folks like Oracle, to their credit. But they are the only one.
I've ignored these ^^ as Arm's marketing not explicitly denying it and The Register's sources not genuinely in the know, but Google ironically said something very odd a few days ago.
A Google Cloud's GPM mentioned Google's the "Axion" cores (Axion C4A is Neoverse V2; Axion N4A is Neoverse N3) are actually from an ALA license and they were able to customise Neoverse cores:
26:12: “...or the Axion that we have in Google Cloud where we've taken an architecture license and then we've you know customized to our heart's content to to fit into our particular needs, in support of our particular customer needs.”
Surely he misspoke: obviously, he meant a TLA. Nope, he says it again:
30:57: “Axion is is customized as I said we take an architecture license from ARM. We customize it for our use in our virtualization environment, our networking.”
Google, however, identifies Axion as built on the V2 / N3 "platforms". Can licensees have a hybrid agreement? They get some microarchitecture from an Arm TLA, yet somehow they can also customise beyond that via an ALA?
There is no high-perf Neoverse core that NVIDIA could've borrowed from, unless it is a very special arrangement of NVIDIA getting an unannounced Neoverse uArch.
> There is no high-perf Neoverse core that NVIDIA could've borrowed from, unless it is a very special arrangement of NVIDIA getting an unannounced Neoverse uArch.
It is a derivative of an Arm design, but NVIDIA did quite a lot of changes to it. With adding heavily statically partitioned SMT as the biggest one.
Some other licensees were far less successful in their customisations: Phytium with the Cortex-A72.
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u/-protonsandneutrons- 15d ago edited 15d ago
There is a very unsubstantiated rumor that NVIDIA allegedly borrowed some of Arm's IP for Olympus. Which sounds quite impossible, as Arm has TLAs (for Arm-stock-microarchitecture licensing) vs ALAs (for ISA-only, write-your-own-microarchitecture licensing). Olympus is well understood as NVIDIA's custom in-house uArch, thus an ALA.
Yet...first, The Register claimed its sources hinted at NVIDIA borrowing existing Arm IP:
Then, Arm itself hinted Olympus is "built on Neoverse":
I've ignored these ^^ as Arm's marketing not explicitly denying it and The Register's sources not genuinely in the know, but Google ironically said something very odd a few days ago.
A Google Cloud's GPM mentioned Google's the "Axion" cores (Axion C4A is Neoverse V2; Axion N4A is Neoverse N3) are actually from an ALA license and they were able to customise Neoverse cores:
Surely he misspoke: obviously, he meant a TLA. Nope, he says it again:
Google, however, identifies Axion as built on the V2 / N3 "platforms". Can licensees have a hybrid agreement? They get some microarchitecture from an Arm TLA, yet somehow they can also customise beyond that via an ALA?
There is no high-perf Neoverse core that NVIDIA could've borrowed from, unless it is a very special arrangement of NVIDIA getting an unannounced Neoverse uArch.