Arm Pioneer: Nvidia's Grace CPU Is Proof That It Will 'Compete Unfairly'

RealNeoMorpheus writes: Arm pioneer Hermann Hauser has once again criticized Nvidia's plan to acquire the semiconductor design company, with The Telegraph reporting Sunday that he believes Nvidia is 'clearly showing it will compete unfairly' if the deal is approved. Hauser's concerns reportedly centered on the Grace processor Nvidia announced at GTC 2021. The company's first Arm-based CPU will connect to high-end GPUs via NVLink, which purportedly offers data transfer speeds up to 900 GBps. That's significantly faster than other technologies -- it's also exclusively available to Nvidia.

This is why Hauser told The Telegraph that he believes using a proprietary interface like NVLink could end up 'locking customers into [Nvidia] products,' which 'clearly shows that they will compete unfairly with other Arm-based server companies such as Amazon and Fujitsu,' rather than retaining Arm's neutrality. Nvidia told The Telegraph that Hauser 'does not understand what Grace will do or its benefits to Arm' and that 'we have been working on Grace using off-the-shelf Arm technology, available to all Arm licensees, long before we agreed to acquire Arm.'

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