After briefly reviewing the revenue performance of the three major chipset vendors in their main product lines, we will now analyze and discuss their technological competitiveness in CPUs, GPUs, and even computing products with other computing architectures. Taking an overview of the recent development history of the three companies, all of them have made acquisitions of semiconductor companies targeting non-CPU and GPU architectures. For example, the most famous acquisitions in the past were Intel's acquisition of Altera, a major FPGA manufacturer, and AMD's recently completed acquisition of Xilinx, etc. In addition, NVIDIA has completed the acquisition of Mellanox, which has further enhanced its competitiveness in DPU and network transmission technologies. In addition, NVIDIA has also completed the acquisition of Mellanox, which further strengthens its capabilities in solutions for DPU and network transmission technologies, and enhances the completeness of its own server system solutions. Whether it is from the laptop or server applications, generally speaking, they are not free from the discussion of solutions such as CPU and GPU, and in the server field, recently there are FPGAs and DPUs and other solutions introduced in an attempt to share the burden of the CPU and try to use the Off Loading method, so that the CPU can focus on the core computing work, so that the overall performance of the system to maximize the performance. This will maximize the performance of the whole system.

(i) CPUCompetition Analysis

From the perspective of CPUs, the x86 architecture used to dominate both the server and PC fields. As smartphone performance continues to improve, the Arm architecture is gradually emerging, and Arm's CPU IP is dedicated to the development of energy efficiency optimization. Although the Arm camp has started to make a lot of efforts in the server and PC fields in the past, the overall results have been far from satisfactory. However, with Apple and NVIDIA each entering the PC and server space with their own Arm architectures, the situation has clearly begun to change. Recently, the most important thing to explore is NVIDIA's Grace CPU product, which adopts Arm's Neoverse V2 CPU design, integrates 72-core CPUs in a single die and provides dual die packaging, with NVIDIA's own NV-Link C2C technology connecting the dies to each other. NVIDIA calls this the Grace CPU Superchip, and the concept also requires the use of LPDDR5X (up to 960GB capacity), with an overall module power consumption of 500 W. In terms of NVIDIA's official announcement in 2022, the Grace CPU and Grace Hopper product lines have already been adopted by ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, Gentec, American Supermicro, and NVIDIA. The Grace CPU and Grace Hopper product lines have been adopted by ASUS, Foxconn Internet, Gigabyte, Vantec, SuperMicro, and Wistron, and the related server systems will be launched in the first half of 2023. It is thus evident that the Arm camp, with the assistance of NVIDIA, has already stabilized itself and gained a foothold in the server ecosystem. Another representative of the Arm camp is Ampere, which was founded not long ago but has been cultivating the server and CSP market for many years, and will release its next-generation server product line, AmpereOne, in 2023. According to the information provided by the company, AmpereOne adopts its own customized cores developed using Arm's v8.6 instruction set, with up to 196 cores. AmpereOne uses Arm's v8.6 instruction set to develop its own customized cores, with a maximum of 196 cores, TSMC's 5nm process, and a TDP of 350W, which makes it easy to see that the company's technological prowess is no less impressive than that of big players such as AMD and Intel.

Figure 1. Ampere Server Processor Development History

Source: Ampere Computing; Collated by Ji-Pu Industrial Trend Research Institute 2023/07