“Some partners want to mix different CPUs and accelerate technologies for specialized use cases,” said Dion Harris, senior director, HPC and AI infrastructure solutions at Nvidia.
“NVLink Fusion enables hyperscalers and custom ASIC builders to leverage Nvidia’s rack scale architecture to rapidly deploy custom silicon,” Harris said during a media briefing. “Arm is integrating NVLink IP so that their customers can build CPU SOCs to connect to Nvidia GPUs. The addition of Arm gives customers more options for specialized, semi-custom infrastructure.”
Open control
However, Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of Greyhound Research, said, “Arm joining NVLink Fusion is being celebrated as a moment of openness, but the architectural consequences are more nuanced. Fusion allows hyperscalers and national labs to plug non-Nvidia CPUs and accelerators into Nvidia GPUs via a coherent interconnect, but with one rule: the connection must terminate on Nvidia’s fabric. This creates the impression of flexibility while reinforcing a center of gravity that remains exclusively under Nvidia’s control.”
