At its autumn AI conference for developers (GTC), chipmaker Nvidia was still entertaining the idea that it would, eventually, acquire processor-designer Arm. At the spring event, that plan is barely even in the rear-view mirror.
The Cambridge-1 computer that the company said it would build in the UK as a cooperation between Nvidia and Arm is going ahead but now looks to be a prototype for a much larger very much Nvidia-focused machine that it plans to use as the blueprint for what founder and CEO Jensen Huang calls an “AI factory”.
Though the focus of Huang’s keynote at the spring GTC this week (21 March 2022) was on the replacement for the Ampere graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture, which is now being moved out to provide AI acceleration for robots and other embedded systems, it stands at the top of a larger strategy. You can read this event in two ways. One as reinforcing the idea that Nvidia is a computer company now that happens to ship chips...